Was that such a horrible thing to want? What if that was all I asked for? Just touch me, I silently begged. Put your hands on my face. Forget about fucking, just touch; please, put your hands on my face—

And then, just like that, he did. His fingers splayed over my eyebrows. His palms pressed into the crown of my head.

“Say everything that comes to mind,” he said.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

I relaxed into the pressure of his hands. I wanted him to press his fingertips, hard and harder, until my head hurt—no, I just wanted him to touch me, it was enough. The warmth of his palms on my scalp. His fingers on my forehead. I wished his fingerprints would leave marks, swirls and swirls across my skin. Freud’s hands are on my face, I thought—and an image rose in me of the Metropolitan Opera House, its five arches stretching up like fingers, each one etched with a series of interlocking glass panes.

“The first time I came was at the opera,” I said.

My stomach lurched, and I went silent. Could I really tell Freud about touching myself as a little girl? If I started, what else would I say? But I had already begged him to fuck me, it wasn’t like he didn’t know—and yet that was different, wasn’t it, from telling him what had happened in the opera house bathroom, so long ago.

“What do you remember?”

“I’m afraid to say,” I said. “Afraid I’ll say too much.”

“Start small,” he said. “Just tell me about where you were.”

“It was in the bathroom,” I said, “right as the opera was about to end.”

The show was Werther, I told him; my parents had brought me. Since the first moment Werther had entered the stage, hunched forward, I had been transfixed—his face a series of sharp edges, framed by thick dark hair swooping back; his body tilted forward, like a fox in flight. Whenever he’d turned, his long black coat had whipped behind him, and I’d caught a glimpse of his ass in tight tan pants: two orbs, catching the light. His ass—I’d first overheard one of the sports boys say the word at school and had been repeating it to myself for weeks. By that point in the show, Werther’s obsession, Charlotte—who was engaged to another man—had rejected him for the final time, sending him into an anguished frenzy. As he writhed on the stage, his cloak sliced through the air, and I saw flashes of his body beneath, white shirt straining this way and that across his chest.

Now, on the couch, recounting the scene for Freud, a pulsing began to build between my legs, just as it had in the opera house seat. I was young, but I had been visited by this second little heartbeat before—like when I’d watched the boys at school shove each other on the playground, or when I’d seen a boy on the beach, hunched forward, his rib cage like bat wings, and imagined what the bones would feel like on my palm, moving beneath his skin. Or, I thought without speaking, when I first saw you. I wouldn’t tell him about the book cover, not now. I couldn’t bear it if he didn’t understand, if he said anything other than: That was me. But did I even need to tell him? Didn’t he already know? Didn’t he know everything? I couldn’t remember which had come first—the book or the opera, Freud or Werther. They had the same effect—that mysterious pulsing, pleasurable and frightening at once. My vagina is sick, I thought in those moments. This I told Freud. I’d sat on my foot as I always did, digging my heel into my crotch, to make the pulsing recede. Onstage, Werther had reached a decision: without Charlotte’s love, he could not continue to live. I read the words on the screen built into the seat in front of me as he sang them: “CHARLOTTE HAS DECREED MY SENTENCE. OPEN MY TOMB!”