I love each of the women who lends her name to a part of this novel, but when I look over what I’ve written about them, I find that, in a written work, these two types of women—who might live in nearly closed-off worlds, where they don’t have to force themselves to question their every movement and choice based on the movements and choices of the other—still seem to compete in an incorporeal beauty contest where it’s not legs and hairstyles that are judged; it’s the soul. Is a man’s prose a women’s beauty contest? I can feel it, that everything leads to me lining up women, then holding up cards with a number from one to ten. If I force myself to stop rating them, is there anything left? Or is a man’s prose nothing more than a fancy cow auction, with the best cows picked? And if I refrain from this, is there anything left?

One afternoon every week with Daniela, for a number of months, in her dim, badly lit apartment, the sound of rain on the windows, in the quiet after putting the babies down for a nap. Or out into the dazzling winter sun those days you could get to the park to air out the little inmates. Me and my sister-in-law, in an intimacy I’d stolen from my brother. I liked being there, in that apartment, immersing myself into a few hours of exhausting drudgery, mopping the floor washing the dishes fixing a toy or kitchen cabinet to calm someone down potty-training helping a kid climb the stairs: a whole slew of activities emanating from a calling that, because of my own psychological limitations, I’d been denied access to before.