Now I found myself looking at young women and even young men on the street and in cafés. When, on my way down an escalator, a woman on her way up smiled and gestured at me, I pursued her into the street. I would, this time, follow my impulses. I approached her with a courage I’d never had as a young man. Then, my desire had been so forceful and strange—which I experienced as a kind of chaos—I’d found it difficult to contain or enjoy. For me to want someone had meant to get involved in maddening and intense negotiations with myself.

I asked the girl to join me for a drink. Later, we walked in the park before retiring to her room in a cheap hotel. Later still, we ate, saw a film, and returned to her room. She loved my body and couldn’t get enough of it. Her pleasure increased mine. She and I looked at and admired each other’s bodies—bodies that did as much as two willing bodies could do, several times, before parting forever, a perfect paradigm of impersonal love, both generous and selfish. We could imagine around each other, playing with our bodies, living in our minds. We became machines for making pornography of ourselves. I hoped there’d be many more occasions like it. How fidelity interferes with love, at times! What were refinement and the intellect compared to a sublime fuck?

As we lay in each other’s arms, and, when she was asleep, I kissed her and said, “Goodbye, whoever you are,” creeping out at dawn to walk the streets for a couple of hours, it occurred to me that this was an excellent way to live.

4

NEXT MORNING I was on the train to Paris, my new rucksack on the rack above me. Before we reached Dover I had helped people with their heavy luggage, eaten two breakfasts, and read the newspapers in two languages. For the rest of the journey I studied guidebooks and timetables.

For a few weeks before I became a Newbody, I had been in what I called an “experimental” frame of mind. After finishing Too Late, I’d been failing as a writer. I’d become more skillful, but not better. I wouldn’t have minded the work getting worse if I’d been able to find interesting ways to make it more difficult. Urgency and contemporaneity make up for any amount of clumsiness, in literature as in love. I had stopped work and had been drawing, taking photographs, and talking to people I’d normally flee. I would see what occurred, rather than hide in my room. Despite these efforts, there was no doubt I was becoming isolated, as if it were the solitude of my craft I had become attached to, and it was that I couldn’t get away from.