Anna, Anna, please shut up about Anna. “No,” I said, as if I’d forgotten, when in truth, it had been a deliberate choice. By ignoring Anna, I could avoid her kind words or warm smile or, even worse, another one of her patless hugs.

“That was rude of us. We were her guests. We should’ve thanked her.”

I tried to shut Kate up with a kiss. As I lunged forward, the bath-water sloshed up and snuffed out the candle.

That kiss led to a series of kisses, which led to our bed, where—more so than normal—I tried to be especially in the moment: the touching, the moving together. Kate’s skin. Her eyes. Her soft mouth. I’d never been so aware of her sweat, her hair, those hands, hips, her back. Her bones. I was awash in Kate and all her Kateness when the light in the closet (which was the only light on) suddenly went out, turning our bedroom pitch-black.

I froze. In the dark, Kate kept moving, saying, “It was an old bulb. I can’t believe it lasted this long.”

“Do you want me to replace it?”

“No,” she said. “Please, it’s nice like this. And don’t stop.”

Now the only light came from the red numbers of Kate’s digital alarm clock. This had the distracting effect of accentuating time. And the time on the clock kept changing. My fear? This was taking too long. My solution? I turned the clock facedown. “So close,” I kept telling her. “I’m so close!”

She wondered did I want to shift positions?

“No,” I said. “So close, so close!” (Say it enough, and it must be so.) After I’d said that a thousand times, I switched to “Almost . . . almost.”

Poor Kate, I thought. She’s going to be sore later.

That was when I changed to a new approach: by any means necessary. No surprise, then, when Anna Brody came back into the picture.

A yoga teacher had once told me, “Let the thought in, let the thought out . . .”

So in came Anna, out went Anna . . .

It was that simple.

The yoga teacher’s name was Megan. I liked when Megan used her hands to adjust my plow and downward dog. Even better, Megan wasn’t Anna. I tried to picture Megan. Surely I wasn’t the first person to have his mind wander during sex. But it felt that way. And the many faces began to fluster me, so I decided to bear down, give a laserlike focus to Kate.

By any means necessary.

I got serious about ejaculating.

Come! Come!

Now, because any thought was fair game, it became like twisting the stem off an apple—Kate, Anna, Kate, Anna. Or like pressing the remote on a TV so as to jump between two favorite channels: Anna, Kate, Anna, Kate.

“I’m about to come.”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“I’m coming!”

“Yes, yes!”

“Here I go—”