In one of the town’s discos, while dancing with my “coven,” as I called them, several of the local men started to taunt me. They didn’t like this spoiled kid dancing with and hugging these happy women night after night, as well as looking after their bags, fetching them drinks, and making sure they all got safely back to the Center. One night, they gathered around me at the bar and said they wanted to see what sort of man I was. They could find this out only on the beach, where we would be able to have “a good talk.” Alicia and the other women had to escort me out of there in a group. Looking back, I could see the men standing at the door, smoking and sneering.

Why did this happen? How did they see me? I inquired of Alicia. As someone who had everything, and a future, too. There was nothing I couldn’t do or be, she seemed to think. They hated it and wanted it. They could have killed and eaten me.

There were other fantasies about me. A woman in her fifties had told Alicia that I made the women feel inadequate. I was a problem-free rich kid bumming around the world before going to work for a bank. “We’re trying to restart our troubled lives here. He’s just passing through,” she said.

“Maybe that is what you are,” Alicia continued, after she’d told me, throwing down her roll-up and rubbing out the stub with her sandal. “You have the confidence, poise, and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. Isn’t that right?”

I didn’t answer; I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t anticipated this much envy. I had, though, known actors who’d become movie stars and been made paranoid and withdrawn as much because of the pressure of imagined spite as that of fame.

I labored over Patricia’s crumpled and folded flesh, humming and thinking. I was good at this; at least I’d learned to love giving comfort and pleasure.

I said, “How can I deal with this? I am beginning to feel like an object. It is not pleasant, it’s persecution.”

“You are supremely enviable,” she said, her voice muffled by the towel. “You’re like the woman everyone wants but no one understands. What you require is support and protection.”

“Who from?”

“That is up to you. But you must ask for it.” She went on, “It doesn’t sound as if you’ve done the wrong thing, Oddjob. You’ve made her and some of the others lovesick but you haven’t misled anyone. You’re a good lad. Women of Alicia’s age—they’d fall in love with a plank of wood.”

I was working hard at Patricia’s body. To my dismay, as I punched and pummeled, she didn’t seem to relax, but began breathing harder.