CHRISTOPHER

In your Sunday morning romantic-partner fantasy you repeatedly use a neutral pronoun.

BELLA

Are you asking if I’m a lesbian? I’m like thirty-two-percent lesbian. Thirty-two-point-five.

(A brief silence.)

What about you?

CHRISTOPHER

I’m twelve-point-five-percent lesbian. Just kidding. There was this girl in high school. She was in my humanities class. We dated for a bit. Attended a couple of seminal school dances. It was pretty cool for a few months. But she eventually dumped me for a thirty-four-year-old South American masseuse with dreads and a Lexus.

BELLA

That sounds like writing.

CHRISTOPHER

Sorry. Her name was Evelyn. Evelyn Boyer. She played the piano. She had pretty hands.

BELLA

Pretty Hands Evelyn. Did you—

CHRISTOPHER

Yeah, Evelyn popped my cherry. And then we followed that up with a handful of semi-chaste erotic experiences, but I think she got bored. I’m pretty sure every time we tried to have sex we were wearing ultra-festive holiday sweaters.

BELLA

I was actually going to ask you if you loved her.

CHRISTOPHER

We mostly played chess and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000.

(Awkward pause.)

I’m about as sexually inclined as your standard, run-of-the-mill parking meter …

(Another awkward pause.)

I sort of don’t even like being touched, actually.

(A silence. Bella exits and returns with a pillow and a blanket.)

Thank you for dinner and the wine.

BELLA

Thank you for the conversation.

(He reaches up and touches her face.)

(To the audience) And then he does that.

(She brings her hand to his. It’s a charged moment.)

But the moment passes—it’s as brief as a swallow—and our hands return to their regularly assigned places and I get up and go to my room and close the door.

(She watches him recede into the darkness.)

In the morning he’s gone.

The extra blanket is neatly folded on the sofa, with the pillow placed on top.

3

BELLA

(To the audience) Three days go by.

And then a fourth.

Christopher doesn’t come see me during office hours.

Throughout the October recess it rains dramatically. For six days straight. A cold, hard, pulverizing rain. The kind that ruins umbrellas and strips the trees of any remaining leaves.

That following week, in class, he seems distant.

After the writing exercise, while he’s packing his things, I approach him.

“Hey,” I say.

He says, “Hey.”

I ask him how he’s been.

“Good,” he answers. “Busy.”

I say, “You’ve been working hard, I take it.”

He says that his novel’s sort of taking over his life.

“That’s great,” I hear myself reply.

I tell him that during class I noticed that his attention was somewhere else.

“You seemed adrift,” I say.

He replies, “I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Your novel,” I offer.

“Yeah, that,” he says.

Just as he turns to leave I tell him that I miss our talks.

He nods.

And then I ask him if I’ve done something wrong.

“Not at all,” he answers.

I say, “Christopher, look at me.”

I’m surprised by the volume of my voice, its sudden intensity.