For a long, imprinting moment, she stared at Stephen from the gleaming mahogany floor, crimson-faced except for the white rage spot forming under each eye, mouth opening and closing in the lull before her lungs filled with air. Years later, when he saw depictions in the movies of women in labor bearing down for the final push, he would flash back to the sprawled Dutch girl regaining her breath and then bellowing at him in pain and frustration, yanking her hair and pounding her heels against the carpeted steps.

Since this ended up being his most vivid memory from childhood, it probably paved the way for his later entanglements with a series of short-fused foreign women. All doctoral students, all specializing in some sort of criticism, mostly of him. By the time he got to the last one, he had more or less worked through his fear of being yelled at in an accent. That one, Mette, didn’t even come close to breaking his heart; in fact, he was glad to be rid of her, a sharp-featured Norwegian beauty with food issues and a predilection for bickering, even about things he agreed with her on.

She was hollow-boned and elegant, very blond (everywhere), with a delicate, feline face. She dressed carelessly in clothing meant to be slid into and out of like a pair of clogs—soft shirts that gaped open alarmingly, revealing the bas-relief of her clavicle, knee-length skirts that swirled when she moved, and, sometimes, a pair of sagging argyle socks. For a while he couldn’t stop looking at her while she slept, read, rode in his truck, or reached behind her head and flipped her hair around in practiced moves that produced either two milkmaid-style braids or a smooth chignon. She cooked gourmet meals, swishing around his kitchen in her thick socks and thin skirt, the profile of one small red-tipped breast winking into view each time she moved.

“You are much less intelligent than most people believe,” she would say, crushing walnut meats with the side of her knife and tossing them into a skillet.

She threw up dinner with a businesslike flexing of the chin and a few short ratchety coughs. Out it would come in a long efficient strand, like a cat dislodging a hairball. She had no shame over it either, but that didn’t mean anything; she had once sat down to defecate while he was standing at the bathroom sink shaving.

After a decent interval, he broke up with her. She raised her eyes from the magazine she was reading and stared at him.

“You are breaking with me?” she asked. It was rhetorical; he knew better than to answer. “But Stephen. You are such a stinking piece of shit.” She lifted her long arms over her head and gently twisted to the right, a yoga stretch, and then to the left. “A useless turd, and it’s certain you will die alone, awake, and filthy in circumstances.”