On the other side of the door: the music swells. I imagine everything in the room swells. There’s darkness all around, but the room is flickering like a movie screen. I picture it lit up, translucent as the sky at twilight.

Carlow must be able to take in everything. It’s a temporary magical power—his sudden ability to observe and remember. She has a lot of male writers on her bookshelves. She’s been studying the unhappy American man—Carver, Singer, Malamud, Cheever, Harrison, Salter. The room is already encased within a haunting nostalgia. The affair has ended at the same time it is happening. At the same time he can touch the perfect white of her smooth throat he can also feel the silence of his life without her. He can imagine her death, his own. We love only within restrictions.

She has a rabbit pelt on her desk, an old clock that plugs into the wall and makes an obnoxious sound like it’s about to overheat. He doesn’t know what’s in the drawers or the closet like I do, but he can see into the top one—she never closes it all the way. It’s full of pencil shavings, the wood chips and those zigzags of kelly green and school-bus yellow. She sharpens her pencils right into the drawer. He doesn’t know about the baby teeth, the old journals, the notes folded into triangles. Instead he knows the secret smells of her, the taste.

The first time he expected the act to be secondary—for the encounter to really be about possession—but it isn’t like that at all. She controls the room like a cat. Her submission is intentional, calculated. She’s selfish, withholding for long stretches, and it makes it unbearable. He’s at her mercy. He doesn’t know why she’s chosen him.

I don’t know why she’s chosen him. I think about it constantly.

I guessed it was because every day is like the day before until it isn’t. Because nothing ever happens. And when something happens it feels like the only thing that has ever happened. Because sometimes we have to tear ourselves away from the people who know us best in order to remind ourselves that we all die alone. That we really live alone.

Of course, there was a possibility that they weren’t fucking at all. I could only imagine weirder things, though, when I imagined their not-fucking. Lonnie using Carlow to write her book, making him pose for her, touch himself, not touch her, smoke her out, making her fall into some kind of desire-trance until she put pen to paper out of something like desperation.