For the record, I had no idea whether Serena had ever had sex. I wasn’t even sure if Laurel and Janet knew, and I didn’t ask them. It seemed contrary to the spirit of things. Serena said very little about herself, as a rule. Conflicting rumors aside, I knew nothing of her life outside the Center. This too was part of her appeal. Now I’m reminded of Sappho’s poetic fragments, or some of the salvaged figures from the Acropolis, the pyramids—curved half-moon faces, carved-out bodices, headless women, armless women, hairless women, disembodied hands still holding on to their precious baubles, having lost everything else, two legs and a shoulder riding an eyeless, hoofless horse. Fragment with the head of a goddess. What’s there is beautiful, but the real ecstasy (from the ancient Greek ekstasis, signifying displacement or trance, literally “standing elsewhere”) comes from the violation of the form—from the empty space. He loves a bodiless dream. The holes into which you can imagine the missing parts, more appealing in the mind than they could ever be in marble, or in flesh. The holes into which you can imagine yourself. The sacred is always obscure. This is a trick we never tire of playing on ourselves.

5

My father, when he was young, was handsome, and not just in the way all girls think their daddies are handsome. He wore blue-tinted contacts over his blue eyes; women would stop him on the street to marvel at the blueness. My mother was not one of these women.

He was a dentist, and his waiting room was always full. He was popular, my mother told me, because of his reputation for silence. That is, he never asked you questions while his fingers were in your mouth. When he had his surgical mask on, and his nose and mouth were erased, the blueness was blinding.

I didn’t like being taken to his office as a child. The metal of it all disturbed me. People with their faces covered.