The slight boomerang bend in her nose came from an accident she had at age twelve. She was trying to flirt with a high school boy by riding her bike along the top of a stone wall. The boy was waiting on the curb for the bus and she rode along above him, waving gaily as if he were a sailor returning from sea. She passed by, only one hand steering the bike, juddering on the uneven stones until she hit a loose one and: smash. She executed a very sudden half-pirouette / half-pike, stalled momentarily in midair like a cartoon, then bellyflopped onto the pavement, breaking her fall with her face, an assault spear-headed by her nose. She didn’t get the guy.

Charlie grew into her clumsiness as if into an allergy, and by the time I met her she had become a danger to herself and anything within striking distance. She is always knocking over stacks of cans at the grocery. Once she tried to put together a bed frame and bloodied her forehead. I discovered her on the floor, on the verge of tears, tools scattered around her like importunate pigeons. She tried a second time to mate the pieces and again struck herself in the face with the flat metal edge, which propelled her over the verge. Another time she set off an alarm at the Czartoryski Museum by headbutting Lady with an Ermine while closely inspecting one of the poorly retouched fingers (“a digit that belongs on E.T., not the duke’s mistress”) and, while being ushered out, klaxons wailing, she knocked over the urn containing the ashes of El Cid. Only the quick swandiving of an alert security guard saved her from disgorging the true grit of the Campeador all over the place. The Krakow paper ran a headline that said, DA VINCI AND EL CID SURVIVE TIME, EROSION, HITLER—BUT AMERICAN SCHOLAR?

This sort of thing happens a lot.

The one time when Charlie isn’t clumsy is during sex. Can I say this? Normally her body stutters, no doubt. Her left / right motor isn’t synchronized; she trips, she lurches in a zombie gait, she steps on the accelerator instead of the brake. She is an inveterate dropper of keys through subway grates. She endangers millennia-old masterworks. All true. But when she is naked she undergoes a wild, nearly Ovidian change. She becomes superkinetic, fluent, dancerly. When I surprise her in the shower, a hard-on banging around like a weather vane in a cyclone, she doesn’t rip the curtain or claw down the shampoo caddy. When she is innocently brushing her hair—thick with curls, fragrant with some odor that I can never fully parse— and I clutch it like a bouquet of flowers while rubbing that spot on her hips, she does not drop the brush or crack a knee on the table. When we fall to the carpet she doesn’t jab me in the ribs. Or elbow my skull. Or nearly enucleate me with a jagged fingernail.