My first real boyfriend was a surfer-depressive named Carl. He signed his notes Peace and love, but above this signature he wrote things like I will infect you with the hardness of my soul. He lived with his biological mother and her asshole husband and their surprisingly delicate offspring: deerlike twin boys and an eavesdropping little girl who wore bells around her ankles that sang the high, clear notes of her trespass. Carl took me miniature golfing but liked to stretch himself taut with speed right beforehand, flick his mood so he was twanging like a rubber band all night. “Motherfucking windmill motherfuckers!” he’d say, kicking obstacles. His eyes got wet and hungry like they were searching for something—maybe for my gaze, probably something beyond. Back then I thought he was being melodramatic, inventing little pegs for hanging up his make-believe pain. Later, I saw it differently. He might have been making up the pegs. He wasn’t making up the pain.

There were pseudo-intellectuals during college: a physicist, a philosopher, a chemical engineer–cum–Japanese historian. There was a poet I met during a summer writing workshop, when a July tornado danced through our town and destroyed two city blocks. Cars flipped into trees, but nobody died. My fellow students wrote poems in response. They wrote: Mother Nature I’ve got questions! They wrote: Why our yards? Why our cars? Why our bars? My poet sent me a text message: I saw the funnel cloud! It was green, green, green!

New York held a string of one-syllabled men: Max, Dan, Scott, Pete, Steve. They were easy to list in retrospect. I dated a banker named Paul because this was what jaded girls did, we dated bankers, and he did what was expected of him: fed me desserts across the tables of expensive restaurants, invested too much ego in his work, never showed much feeling. But when I left him for good, he cried right in front of me. He pretended it was only allergies, pollen, the luck of the season: spring.

I liked the ache that crept into his voice during those final moments. He was willing to let me hear it. I was terrible then. I could only feel another person’s pain as something hurting in myself. For some people that’s empathy, but for me it felt like theft.

Tilly listened patiently to my catalog. She rubbed a cool damp cloth across her cheeks, her neck, the dip of collarbone where moisture had gathered.

“You’ve turned them into little servings,” she said. “Like appetizers.”

I pictured her working one of her catering jobs years ago, a sad-eyed girl offering pigs in a blanket with her slim fingers—another helping and another, always another.

“That’s fair, I suppose. I’ve practiced.”

“What I want to know,” she said, “is what hurt.”

So I told another story. This story was about finding a downtown clinic during an autumn cold snap and letting a woman suck the small bud of an embryo from my body.