One afternoon, the comedian sent me out to the hairdressers before dinner. The salon was full of tanned women who picked over my scalp and commented on my blessed position. They gifted me a glass of champagne and I blew childish ripples in the surface. I left in the middle of the hair operation. I looked at my half-do in the mirror and said, ‘Wow! That looks great. Thank you, thank you so much,’ and I walked out. I expected security or someone like security to stop me at the door, but they didn’t.

I spent the rest of the day wandering up and down the shaded, immaculate street my boyfriend and I called home. I wanted to make a discovery so I could feel like I lived there. At one end, near the subway station, was a psychic’s office. She sat in a sturdy, high-backed chair and, apart from draping a red velvet curtain across the room to separate her office from her living quarters, did nothing to make herself look mystical. That’s brazen, I thought as I passed. Only someone gifted would do so little to announce themselves.

That night, at dinner, nobody criticised my unusual hairstyle. It must have been decided it couldn’t be an accident because nothing about the comedian was accidental. They gazed deep into my eyes and told me I looked great. When we returned from our excursion the comedian and I fucked coldly, like we were two expensive, shiny products, as if I was something sleek he could press that would produce the correct answers.

Afterwards, as we lay in bed, he asked, ‘What do you want more than anything?’

‘To be loved,’ I said, just like that. Lately, I had become weary of the whole act I’d been cultivating. It was pathetic. ‘You know, in Ireland,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t well.’

Day to day he let me pretend to be whoever I wanted to be, a singular kindness. He had several versions of his own past; all that remained consistent was how he had overcome. In every version was the track and his mother staring blank-eyed beyond him into space. If he recognised any similarities between us, he didn’t acknowledge them. I realised I didn’t really know how this went. I hadn’t had many boyfriends. Most of the boys I knew at home were terrified of me, though if I slept with them, they were briefly satisfied. I remembered the boy I was seeing when it happened, carting me around as if I was on loan, glamorous but refundable.

‘Has that gone away now?’ my boyfriend asked.

He wasn’t dumb but he was coddled. He was like a man with a thousand relentless wives. He had people who designed his food, sourced his conversational material. They cut up his food, cut up his words. All that was left to do was open his mouth wide.