On the morning before we left for school, the telephone rang. When she cut things off with each of these lovers, the banker instructed, she was to wear a skirt with nothing underneath. She told us this as we crossed the frozen field on our way to the bus stop, and we laughed. But then Soraya stopped and cupped her lighter from the wind. In the brightness of the flame I caught her eyes, and for the first time I felt afraid for her. Or afraid of her, maybe. Afraid of what she lacked, or what she possessed, that drove her beyond the place where others would draw the limit.

Soraya had to call the banker from the pay phone at school at certain times of the day, even when it meant excusing herself in the middle of class. When she arrived at the Hôtel Royal for one of their meetings, an envelope would be waiting for her at the front desk, containing elaborate instructions for what she was to do when she entered the room. I don’t know what happened if she failed to follow the banker’s rules, or follow them to his exacting standards. It didn’t occur to me that she might have allowed herself to be punished. Barely out of childhood, I think what I understood then, however simply, was that she was engaged in a game. A game that at any moment she could have refused to go on playing. That she, of all people, knew how easily rules could be broken, but that she elected, in this instance alone, to follow them—what could I have understood then about that? I don’t know. Just as thirty years later I don’t know if what I saw in her eyes when the flame illuminated them was perversity, or recklessness, or fear, or its opposite: the unyielding nature of her will.

During the Christmas break Marie flew to Boston, I went to stay with my family in Basel, and Soraya went home to Paris. When we returned two weeks later, something had changed in her. She seemed withdrawn, closed up in herself, and spent her time listening to her Walkman in bed, reading books in French, or smoking out the window. Whenever the phone rang, she jumped up to answer it, and when it was for her she shut the door and sometimes didn’t come out for hours. Marie came to my room more and more often, because, she said, being around Soraya gave her the creeps. As we lay together in my narrow bed, Marie would tell me stories about Bangkok, and however full of drama they were, Marie could still laugh at herself and make me laugh. Looking back, I think that she taught me something that, however many times I have forgotten it and remembered it since then, has never really left me: something about the absurdity, and also the truth, of the dramas we need to feel fully alive.