He turns to face me.

His eyes draw out my weakness.

I feel myself lurching toward a desk. I have to brace myself.

“You did nothing,” he says. And then he leaves.

It feels as though I’ve been struck in the face with a wet rag.

*

BELLA

(To the audience) That night I stop at Anna Liffey’s, an Irish pub on Whitney Avenue.

I’m sitting at the bar, having a glass of red wine, when a man to my right starts up a conversation.

His name is Clint and he’s a contractor who’s been hired to renovate the interior of a hotel on Chapel Street. It’s a month-long stint and the construction company is putting him up in town. He’s from Bridgeport and has a slight Boston accent, a rust-colored mustache, and sweet, peaty breath, and after two glasses of wine I find him to be handsome and charmingly stoic in a lonesome cowboy kind of way.

I let him take me back to his motel room, at the Econo Lodge on Pond Lily Avenue.

As soon as we enter his room, which smells like some strange combination of cleaning fluids and chewing tobacco, he openly takes a Viagra and we have sex in a classic missionary arrangement with the TV on.

Everybody Loves Raymond.

Just as Clint enters me, Ray Romano’s wife enters the kitchen and tells him that she’s invited both of her divorced parents and their current significant others to Thanksgiving.

Shortly after the whacky, extended TV family gathers in Ray Romano’s living room, Clint begins to deploy a kind of herky-jerky trundling method of intercourse that seems to involve indecipherable grunting, Tourette’s-like facial ticks, and the avoidance of acute back pain.

I do get lost in the activity for a few measures. His body is dense and hairy and moves over and into me like some soft rectangular machine that pushes smaller objects toward their inevitable path on an assembly line.

When he’s not grunting or trying to avoid back spasms, in curt, explosive syllables he shouts, “Good pussy! Good pussy!” Has he renamed me Pussy? If so, I can’t tell if he’s scolding or praising me. And does he mean Good-comma-Pussy? Or Good-pussy-period? Are the G and P capitalized, like some proper noun representing the Official Legion of Handsome Clint’s one-night stands known as Good Pussy?

When Clint comes he basically sounds like a woman running from a killer in a horror movie.

During one of the more pleasant thirty-second stretches of our conjoined apocalypse I think of Christopher Dunn.

I dress and our farewell is consummated with a businesslike handshake. We don’t exchange numbers. Nothing more is said. I return home as if I’ve taken a brisk walk and suffered a slightly sprained ankle.

It’s the first time I’ve been with anyone in over two years.

I’m astounded by this fact.

Two years.

A week later I would collapse in my living room while reading James Salter.

While recovering in the hospital I receive a card.