I knelt, towel dropping, leaning toward her. She turned like she was about to kiss me, her mouth approached my bearded cheek, and she bit me—hard.

I yelped, rushed back to the bathroom, naked, and shoved my face under the faucet. In the mirror, her toothmarks were red. She didn’t call out that she was sorry—maybe she thought I was exaggerating—I was so pissed off, when I finished pouring water over the bite I went back to her room (she was texting with someone and didn’t look up), grabbed my clothes and backpack, and headed down the stairs, almost slipping, wet from my dripping hair. I got ready quickly and opened the door, my shoes still untied.

Before I slammed the door shut, though, I called up to her: “Congratulations on your career!”—a joke of ours—I’d heard a seventy-year-old intellectual say it at an elegant dinner while he was pumping away on the hand of another old man. Such a mysterious phrase. The perfect description of the foolishness of passing time.

[I began this chapter by saying I hadn’t been able to figure out what this part means. It’s a sentence I’ve kept since the first draft: I can’t manage to cut it even though over time, writing and revising, I’ve pretty much given a meaning to what happened that night. But I’m keeping that between us, along with the other details that make up this section, as a reminder that only the imagination, not opinion, can express inner feelings.]

I walked back along the road, to the canals, and ran into two friends and stopped for a drink. One of them was a woman who at some point—when, I couldn’t say—had gotten into the habit of emailing me without pretext and giving me extremely intimate hugs, more sexual than affectionate. When the other person left us on our own, I asked her to walk with me, and we wound up going to the station where my hotel was located, because she lived nearby. It was a nice long walk in that city that was always empty: on some of the wet, empty streets, the asphalt shone like marble.

She was a very pleasant woman, a PR rep, and very straightforward, even if her job (which she was good at) required subterfuge. A brief description of her—dark circles under her eyes, wrinkles, wavy hair, Mediterranean, languid breasts, sturdy legs but lush hips—harkens back to some fastidious nineteenth-century novel that points out a woman’s wilting beauty at thirty, forty … Yet in spite of my description, I think the current social-financial continuity between twenty and forty is creating a world where a woman can still look and feel like a girl while already possessing that generosity and complicity, the gentle air, that real young women lack.