Her fingers are articulate, certain.

Her hips are dextrous and undulant.

Her body is all reflex, full of grace, rife with the purity of its own movement. It knows, as it knows at no other time, exactly what it wants to do. And it does it.

How does it happen? How does she attain this transformation from smash-prone klutz to sex ballerina? I don’t know, but sometimes, when I’ve had a little too much naloxone or pancuronium bromide or norisol or something and am feeling high enough to permit myself some fantasy, I can’t help thinking, wistfully:

Maybe it’s me?

Considering Charlie’s all-around wonderfulness and my nearly record-setting sparsity of female contact, why am I so cowardly about popping the question?

Part of the problem is that, outside of centuries-old artwork, I don’t have anybody to talk to about it. And I have no frame of reference. I have almost no memory of my mother and father together, and I don’t have any friends with real girlfriends to speak of—Herk’s Goldfish Girls don’t count¹⁴—so I don’t know what is normal and what isn’t. I am limited mainly to sitcom wisdom on this, which, according to a show I saw recently, says that to men engagement is terrifying because it is a visceral reminder of mortality. You are about to become engaged to be married, to just one person, with whom you will presumably spend the rest of your life and produce offspring, who are really just second-draft yous, said the hipster on the show, future yous, man, set to replace you after you kick it. Who needs that? Not me, said the guy. I don’t want to have a kid successor. I want to be the kid.

I’m not sure his logic applies to me, necessarily—I metabolize visceral reminders of mortality every day, and they are much less pleasant than the strokable Charlie Izzo—but I still have the same fear. I’ve got no problem pulsing a site I know has a very good chance of being targeted by some of Azar’s trigger-happy talent, but man, when I crack that velvet box open it creaks like the coffin and terror makes the words in my throat turn into cement.

It’s also true that practically everyone I have ever loved has died a painful death. That does not exactly provoke the urge to certify another love.

The counterargument to this is Charlie herself.

When I grit my teeth in my sleep she rubs my jaw and makes me stop.

When I’m depressed she cooks me Maltese meals with names I cannot pronounce.

She even makes me want to take it easy with the succinylcholine chloride.

So why don’t I just spit it out, already?¹⁵

I don’t know. Since I’ve met Charlie I have logged about five thousand hours of time sitting alone in dark rooms, thinking of almost nothing else, and I still don’t have the answer.

In the museum, Charlie also told me her mother died when she was nine. Before the accident her mother was opening a party supply business and she had just received a huge order of balloons. Their house in Long Island was filled, in some places floor to ceiling, with countless boxes of them. After the accident her father could not bear to get rid of the balloons, but he also wouldn’t let anyone open them. So Charlie grew up in a house full of aging balloons that she was never allowed to touch. Sometimes, late at night, she would come home to find her father drunk in a chair, bringing the navel-like opening of the balloons to his mouth tenderly, as if in a kiss, and blowing them up. Then he would cradle them in the darkness of the room and whisper to them like children.