When she discovered that I did not have an erection, she lay back and stared at the ceiling and said nothing. I felt humiliated.

“Is it me?” she asked.

“No.”

“You prefer boys to girls?”

“I probably should have told you that before,” I said. She reached for her cigarettes on the bedside table and lit one.

“I wish I was a boy just now,” she said.

“I wish you were too,” I said and nudged toward her and held her in my arms.

“Have you always been gay?”

“ Ever since I was a little boy.” She kissed me on the ear.

“ I thought that Donald was gay when I met him first. maybe it was because he had a mustache and someone had told me that gay men always wore mustaches. But he turned out not to be.” she drew on the cigarette.

“Where did you meet him?”

“We worked together. At the beginning I was his boss, but we were thrown together a lot. We got to know one another very well.”

“Was that in Washington? You never talk about where else you have been.” It was a relief now to discuss something else. We spoke in a hush, making our quiet voices a sort of intimacy.

“No. It was in Santiago. We were there when Allende’s government fell.” She drew hard on her cigarette again. I was waiting for her to continue. She left silence.

“You were in Chile? I didn’t know that.”

She spoke in a tone I had never heard before, as though choosing the words and saying them were difficult, as though the implication of what she was saying had occurred to her only now. She held my hand.

“We were very junior then, raw, we had not been prepared for what happened. Later, much later, I realized that I should have known. All the signs were there, and I attended meetings, but I didn’t understand the language that they used then. I didn’t know that when a military man used words like destabilize, or undermine, or other words that seemed innocent or nearly innocent, they meant something different than when used by a diplomat or a civilian. I suppose I knew that Allende was going to be overthrown, but I thought it would be done slowly, even diplomatically, although I know that, in retrospect, that sounds unlikely. We mixed only with Americans, and some Americans who came had real problems with the Allende regime. There was a lot at stake. We didn’t work in the embassy building, we had a floor in a building nearby. It was only afterward we really knew what happened.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“We were locked in our own world. We saw no newspapers or television. It was years later I read about it and I went with Donald in Stockholm to see the film Missing. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes,” I said. She stubbed out the cigarette.