She was working as an advertising model to earn a living while studying pantomime under somebody-or-other, a famous teacher, apparently. Though the work end of things was a drag and she was always turning down jobs her agent lined up, so her money situation was really rather precarious. But whatever she lacked in take-home pay she probably made up for on the goodwill of a number of boyfriends. Naturally, I don’t know this for certain; it’s just what I pieced together from snippets of her conversation.

Still, I’m not suggesting there was even a glimmer of a hint that she was sleeping with guys for money. Though perhaps she did come close to that on occasion. Yet even if she did, that was not an essential issue; the essentials were surely far more simple. And the long and short of it was, this guileless simplicity is what attracted a particular kind of person. The kind of men who had only to set eyes on this simplicity of hers before they’d be dressing it up with whatever feelings they held inside. Not exactly the best explanation, but even she’d have to admit it was this simplicity that supported her.

Of course, this sort of thing couldn’t go on forever. (If it could, we’d have to turn the entire workings of the universe upside down.) The possibility did exist, but only under specific circumstances, for a specific period. Just like with “peeling mandarin oranges.”

“Peeling mandarin oranges?” you say?

When we first met, she told me she was studying pantomime.

Oh, really, I’d said, not altogether surprised. Young women are all into something these days. Plus, she didn’t look like your die-cast polish-your-skills-in-dead-earnest type.

Then she “peeled a mandarin orange.” Literally, that’s what she did: She had a glass bowl of oranges to her left and another bowl for the peels to her right—so went the setup—in fact, there was nothing there. She proceeded to pick up one imaginary orange, then slowly peel it, pop pieces into her mouth, and spit out the pulp one section at a time, finally disposing of the skin-wrapped residue into the right-hand bowl when she’d eaten the entire fruit. She repeated this maneuver again and again. In so many words, it doesn’t sound like much, but I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes—she and I kept up a running conversation at the counter of this bar, her “peeling mandarin oranges” the whole while, almost without a second thought—I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. Unnerving, to say the least. Back when Eichmann stood trial in Israel, there was talk that the most fitting sentence would be to lock him in a cell and gradually remove all the air. I don’t really know how he did meet his end, but that’s what came to mind.