But this fellow, the fifty-seventh—it is definitely unseemly to have kept count—had a quality of pride and a knowledge that the others had not. He was the first to rouse me, to make me run between the legs, even with only a look. One night he had been fooling with me for a while and stumbled upon the right place, the place, and set me off. I was surprised, and then I was wild with anticipation. I cried out, this time for real; I had pretended thousands of orgasms in my time, arched my back and trembled and rattled my heels, moaned, laughed, raked my nails—all to simulate the only models I had, from literature. But at last I was undone; my orgasm was real. I gave in. I grabbed his hand to keep him from losing his place. I gripped his hair, my hips stiffened. He went on for some time and my hands slid down to keep him there.

But he was insulted by my obvious enthusiasm; he must have realized I had been performing before. It disgusted him.

“Do it yourself, then!” he said, his bitter voice a bludgeon, and rolled away from me, furious.

I began to weep, my sobs puddling, coagulating, until snot and tears ran into my ear. I crept out of the bed, crawled over behind the chairs, choking and grunting with pain. The moon or some streetlight spared me nothing; my great white mounds of flesh spread out on the floor, in the periphery of his view. Though I might have bawled that he had never managed to bring me to orgasm, not once in all those months, that he was too ignorant of my anatomy to do so, that all that time I had been pretending, that all along he had been using me for masturbation—and likely any other woman he’d ever slept with as well, no matter what they may have said at the time—though I might have managed to screech this out through the snot, it would not do. It was not in my nature, not with him. He was my Beauty. To clearly explain myself, I would have also needed to describe the comfort that warmed and softened in my lungs and chest, the indescribable pleasure of his face above mine in the bed, sensations we have traditionally called love.