Unlike Marie, Soraya didn’t radiate trouble. At least not the sort of trouble that comes of recklessness, of a desire to cross whatever boundaries or limits others set for one without consideration of the consequences. If anything, Soraya radiated a sense of authority, exquisite for the fact that it derived from an inner source. Her outward appearance was neat and composed. She was small, no taller than I was, and wore her dark straight hair cut in what she called a Chanel bob, made up her eyes with winged eyeliner, and had a downy mustache that she made no effort to conceal, because she must have known that it added to her allure. But she always spoke in a low voice, as if she only trafficked in secrets, a habit that might have been formed during her childhood in revolutionary Iran, or in her adolescence, when her appetite for boys, and then men, quickly outgrew what was considered acceptable by her family. On Sundays, when none of us had much to do, the three of us would spend the day closed up in the back bedroom listening to cassettes and, in that low-slung voice further deepened by smoking, descriptions of the men Soraya had been with and the things she’d done with them. If these accounts never shocked me, it was partly because I didn’t yet have a solid enough sense of sex, let alone the erotic, to really know what to expect from it. But it was also because of the coolness with which Soraya told her stories. She had about her a kind of unassailability. And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core, like all natural gifts that come to us before effort, and what might happen if it failed her. The sex she described seemed to have little to do with pleasure. On the contrary, it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial. Only when, woven into Soraya’s discursive stories, Tehran came up and she recounted her memories of that city was her sense of pleasure truly palpable.