Her fiancé had never slept here, on that mattress on the floor. Our complete delusion when it comes to the institution of the couple can lead to such aberrations, such abstractions, we can only blink, denying what’s plain to see. The accountant didn’t even feel the need to lay claim to that territory, sleeping and fucking on that mattress upstairs, yet he still pretended that society viewed him as Eleonora’s fiancé. When I was with her, after we made love, we’d both work for a few hours. We’d order delivery. Sometimes, if she worked too hard in bed, she couldn’t sleep, and she’d pull small clumps of hair out scratching her scalp because her anxiety meds had stopped working and gave her migraines, and she was afraid to start taking sleeping pills; then during the day, at work, I’d catch her sleeping at her desk, head to one side, or resting on a huge contemporary Indian novel, the first galleys she’d worked on when she started at the publishing house. She was thirty (I was almost forty) and she hadn’t considered whether or not she wanted children, or when, and if she did, if she’d go back to working at the same pace afterward. Her fiancé was the kind of man who told his partner that he wanted a family and then told his mother that they were still waiting, and that his partner was to blame: so her future mother-in-law, who had no other children, couldn’t stand Eleonora, who’d sit watching the game with them on Sundays and, after ten minutes, pull out a manuscript and start underlining and annotating. And yet, no one ever blurted out: you’re not a couple—this is fiction. And so, an entire family gathered in a living room in Lombardy defined the circumstances of my love life.

I heard the shower turn off, and Eleonora appeared at the top of the stairs in a towel and leaned over to see me at the table—“Bring up the bottle”—her damp hair dangling down.

I took my time, finished my drink in three slow sips, smiling all the while, because she still wanted me.

I climbed the stairs with the vodka and two glasses of ice, my backpack over my shoulder.

Her room had no door and was a depository for discarded belongings: shoes of various colors, T-shirts and blouses hanging on clothing racks, toys and pop memorabilia collected in Asia. The sheets on her mattress were soft, the color of marzipan. The left side of the room had floor-to-ceiling windows, and the setting sun dusted through the electric blinds with their wide, lacquer-wood slats. I was there once more, once more, and always for the last time.