After just a few nights, she left me a key. “We have to do some planning as soon as I get home,” she said sheepishly. “So you don’t need to drive back to Berkeley, and waste all that time.” She’d return to find that I’d been lying on her floor most of the day, reading, working. (Yes, working! For something about her presence had revived my commitment to the discipline of history. I saw how people did jobs. I could look upon my sample chapters with a kind of aloof pragmatism, because Anita would be home in a few hours, and we had something that needed us, which meant we needed each other.)

There we were: me, shaking myself off when she opened the door at six p.m., going on a run around the sterile Palo Alto streets. Me, permitted to be myself with dangerous ease in her company. Me, there must be something badly wrong with her if she could tolerate me, like this. Me, you know what’s wrong with her, it’s cousin to what’s wrong with you. Her, in bed, where she was surprisingly muted and mousy, that girlish tongue stealing out adorably between her teeth, that tightening concentration of her features before she undid my pants.

The revelations came like this: a week or so in—we were in bed. She had her back to me. I pushed my fingers against the nape of her neck and considered my thumb impression. There I was, briefly settled into her skin, and then I was gone.

“That feels nice,” she said, though I hadn’t entirely meant it to. “My mother used to rub her nails up and down my back when I was a kid.”

“This way?”

“Softer,” she said.

I tried again. Through her west-facing windows, the sun was lowering, darkening her. I had the impression that the years had accumulated on her skin and I was pulling them off, slight scratch by gentle scratch.

Wendi was the only person I’d ever really dated, and with her there had been a similar sense of having been vetted on some prior occasion, so that when things accelerated, it seemed the jolt had come from somewhere, from before, and there were no mundane introductions. After Wendi, I always wished I could walk into something having been seen in all the necessary ways, so bodies could be bodies and history lighter.

“You’ve done this a lot,” Anita said. It wasn’t a question. “Slept with someone quickly.”

“Quickly?”

“You know what I mean.”

I returned my nails to her back. “I find—found—it easier to sleep with someone when I didn’t know a whole story about them,” I said. “I’d start to feel entangled. The more you know, the more, I don’t know, narrative responsibility you have. You have to make sure you’re not one of those other terrible guys they tell you about.”