“You were so nuts about her,” Adam agreed. “You even read the terrible poems she wrote and watched those videos where she talked to her shoes, and you didn’t make vomit noises.”

“Shut up!” said Louise, who has a weakness for vague, winsome women who are late for everything and apologize by handing the other person a leaf they found. “Arielle was a huge mistake!” she swore. “I was on cold medication!”

“But you loved her,” said Adam. “Just the way Carter loves Prince Edgar.”

“Both of you, stop it right now,” I told them firmly. “Absolutely nothing happened and nothing ever will happen and no one loves anyone. It was just this deeply strange New York moment when you meet someone you could never meet anywhere else.”

“It’s like going to Disney World and meeting someone wearing a huge rubber Prince Edgar head,” agreed Louise.

“But weirder things have happened,” said Adam. “Royals fall in love with commoners all the time. And the fact that he’s openly gay is just, oh my God . . .”

“Are you masturbating?” Louise asked him.

“In my mind. Except it goes way beyond that—I mean, if this was a musical, Carter and Edgar would be in different places, like Carter would be here, and Edgar would be in his hotel suite on the hundred and fifty-eighth floor, gazing out at the lights of the city . . .”

Adam’s currently seeing DuShawn, another dancer, and as foreplay, they sometimes perform the choreography from the love duets in Carousel or West Side Story and post it on YouTube, and now he was improvising a dance between Edgar and me.

“And there’d be a dream ballet,” Adam announced, taking an invisible Edgar in his arms, “where they’d find each other and sing about the meaning of true love.”

“And then they’d both go on Grindr and get some,” said Louise.

I went to bed early because I was disconcerted and didn’t want to discuss Edgar. Meeting him already felt like a blip, like it might not have happened or maybe I’d had a glimpse of him and then let my imagination embroider everything, which is something I do all the time. I’ll see a guy window-shopping and he’ll become a pediatrician with a collie and we’ll restore a colonial farmhouse in Connecticut with an attached barn and adopt two kids until he cheats on me with a bearded male hipster nurse and I shoot them both in cold blood and a photo of me fills the front page of the New York Post with the headline:

GAY KILLER SAYS, ‘HE HAD A MAN BUN.’

And I imagine all this within ten seconds, by which time the original guy has been joined by his wife and toddler.