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!”

I paused in my recollection, so long that Freud gently asked, “And then?”

“When I had that…feeling,” I said, referring to the pulsing, “I thought maybe I needed to—” To pee, I was about to say. “To go to the bathroom.”

I had hurried out of the auditorium, I told Freud, side-stepping along the row of seats, all those middle-aged knees. I could feel my father’s gaze burning into my back, reproaching me, but I kept speed walking, my shoes thudding on the carpet, past the usher and along the hallway and by the water fountain and through the bathroom door.