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.