The elevator’s window panel stretched all the way from the lobby to the top of the building. I was lifted up, up, without any effort as the sun set over the East River. A wooden water tower stood on top of a brick building, a hut for a secret ceremony. Red Hook always appeared as a universe apart from the city, with its dappled cobblestones and the possibility of rough sex with a celebrity. Is this enlightenment, to be carried up above material concerns, the trash on the sidewalk, the poor people who lived in Red Hook before it gained a giant furniture retailer and a good grocery store with 112 varietals of olive oil, and toward the sky? I asked myself.

I didn’t think so.

The door was propped open. She had the whole floor.

I lined up my shoes by her front door and left my backpack on a hook, took out my dicks, and walked down the hallway in polka-dotted socks.

R’s guest apartment was empty except for tower fans and wisps of furniture. The emptiness made the space even more lavish. I was used to seeing everyone’s bikes, DFW novels, winter coats, unused exercise equipment, tropical house plants, possibly bedbug-ridden mannequins found in the street, amateur paintings of solar systems, cracked lime-green Le Creusets, comforters with jungle scenes, vats of protein powder, carafes from long-gone coffeemakers, wrong world maps, saucer chairs. The stuff devoured all the apartment air and did not recycle it, like trees.

Many times, I’d walked down the corridor thinking, What if my life was like this apartment, airy, decluttered, one part leading to another instead of like my apartment, with everyone traipsing in and out of my room in thought and scent, a building staircase that smelled like dog piss, and, in the backyard, a tableau of trash blowing every which way?

R did always have an assistant lurking around. Sometimes her PA was standing in the kitchen when I walked in for some seltzer.

Here’s the thing about being heard as I fucked R or practiced deepening my voice in the bathroom: as a trans, I’d lived under constant self-surveillance, with my own questionably intelligent, vigorous eye keeping tabs on me. What did I care if an ex-high-school-newspaper editor in chief with a walkie-talkie saw me chopping a piece of ginger for R’s butthole?

She was on the bed, drinking a bottle of juice in a sheer shift that showed her nipples and the shadow of her pubic hair. Her blond hair was French-braided, reminding me of the time my guardian, Margot, took me to get my hair yanked into a complex design at a salon for my birthday, and the stylist pulled my scalp until I cried and Margot snapped, “Why are you always so sensitive, Penfield?” and I told myself that I would get revenge on her one day by bringing my sensitivity into the world as a gift instead of a liability.