I’d made the best possible move. Since no one would give a loan to an editor, not one bank, all that public relations work in my fifteen years in publishing meant nothing in comparison to that pounce of mine down the stairs.

The biggest financial decision of my life was pushing that elevator button so my father couldn’t get on before I met him on the ground floor.

When I left, I felt like someone used to feel who’d just graduated, or obtained a full-time position, or gotten married. I remember my churning emotions while I drove along through the bypass tunnel—I felt like I was choking—and I had to stop myself from thinking too much: it was overwhelming. In the cars there were all these men and women, and I had no idea of their financial situation, but many of them were thinking of their homes and their possessions.

And I felt ashamed by this idea. I owned nothing, had built nothing. The largest thing I’d built was my job for a large publishing house, which I’d just destroyed like it was nothing, and truthfully, didn’t miss at all.

And what if the elevator had gone down to the main floor with someone on it, and I hadn’t managed to catch my father away from my mother? I wouldn’t have told him my idea, and maybe after a few minutes, I’d have found it ridiculous, shaken my head and smiled, embarrassed it had ever crossed my mind.

My phone dinged in my pocket; with so much traffic, I pulled in between two stopped cars and read my message—two little hearts from my mother. I started to cry, and I cried until I reached my neighborhood, the instant replay still going of those few life-changing minutes. Their glorious generation that had made money, suffered, explained, sacrificed themselves, gone into debt, been self-congratulatory, that had ceaselessly produced new visions, new worlds, that glorious generation that had fed me one bite at a time was now finally offering me an entire slice of its delicious pie.

I’m recalling this period in my life to see if I’m capable of describing the women I love or have loved without turning them into caricatures, into saviors or sirens, into wives, mothers, or whores. I’ve grown tired of the comedy of the clumsy man who always makes the wrong move, and since I returned home and made the wrong move, informing Barbara of my project without any preparation, any strategy, I’ll just avoid that trite scene of the man who makes a mess of things through sheer gullibility—the neurotic, obsessive, childish point of view of the typical male narrator—and I’ll tell the story instead through Barbara’s eyes. Also, because she and I discussed it so long afterward, I’m fairly sure I can reconstruct—as they say in video games or pornography—her POV.