It was hot in the old house. The lady on the ground floor, bleary with glaucoma, watched four square inches of her television screen through a magnifying glass, and left her door open to hear us as we passed. She answered the phone in the hall when it rang, and shrieked the number up the stairwell: “Forty-one!” if it was for the pale cleric, “Seventeen!” if it was one of the countless faceless girls who called my phone for the pleasure of hearing his voice.

I told him once that I didn’t care if he kept girls hanging on strings from the window ledge as long as I was one of them. It was not true, but it would have taken a lot of damage to mar him for me. I chose to accept his faults and keep him near.

I always thought of him as pacing, but in fact most of the time he sat very still. He was starkly beautiful with his feet up and the blank pain of boredom on his face. His jaws and lips and nose were so delicately cut that sometimes, as he slept, I would examine his face, marveling at its perfection. I was weakened by my love for him, and he was utterly miserable, stuck with me and by the small degree of comfort I could offer him with my money, my willingness to work for him, the cloying amiability of my devotion. He was not proud to be with me. I was too fat, my laugh too coarse. My occasional melodramatic weeping—“You can’t love someone like me…”—all too easily explained what we both felt. He responded by dutifully patting my head. He was unable to say what I needed to hear, due to a lack of facility or his inclination toward lying, which only made him more appealing to me. Even as he patted and stroked my hair, he stared at the wall with a sick expression, yearning to be somewhere else.

Most nights, tired after working for hours at the small table with the lamp, when his poems had sucked him dry, he would slide in beside me. As he lay, breathing softly, looking up at the ceiling, I would be woken up by the pain plucking at him. So we both lay, unspeaking, until finally he would turn to me and work himself to sleep. I was grateful for this evidence of the strength of his will, if not affection.

Now, all those years I had never had an orgasm that was not self-induced. Fifty-seven men—I had counted, too many for comfort, and only a few of any interest—had come with my cooperation but made no dent on my pleasures. The exercise was necessary for my sanity. It reassured me and let me sleep. I sought it out with ravenous energy, but on just as many nights, when my desires were urgent and specific, I rubbed myself into quick peaks of relief.