They had been introduced by her dad’s friend Anouk, an experimental filmmaker in her fifties. Joseph wrote Justine a postcard after that encounter, asking if she wanted to get coffee and talk, that he was “around if you ever need an ear.” As though he was willing to do her a favor. She was intrigued, but coffee with Joseph was complicated by the fact that Justine had recently moved back in with her college boyfriend, Elliot. She and Elliot had lived together after college for a couple of years. They fought with the clean, absolute rage of siblings, pulverizing their sex life while ballooning their mutual affection to a point where they seemed destined to be together; their breakup was incomplete, shadowed by the specter of marriage in the offing, despite all the evidence. Their solution to this conundrum was to find an apartment with a three-month lease. That is, they wanted to try living together again, but not for a whole year. This apartment was on Lafayette Street. They never actually had any sex there, and Elliot always seemed to be agreeing to babysit his brother Seth’s ancient dog in White Plains, because Seth was an emergency room doctor whose girlfriend had left him, the dog needed a lot of attention, and the ex-girlfriend had no interest in sharing custody of an epileptic Weimaraner. A few weeks into the lease, Justine, who was a fashion photographer, booked a job in L.A.; the fashion house put her up at a trendy hotel where she was given a nice sunny apartment with a kitchen. It made her feel so happy to be in that little apartment with no memories. In need of a book, she dashed across Sunset Boulevard during a pause in the traffic and ran into the bookshop facing the hotel. After browsing in the history section, then the fiction section, she decided on a biography of Barbara Stanwyck. She loved Barbara Stanwyck as an actress and was anxious to know the details of her life. She opened the book while she was on line to pay and was already fascinated when she heard her old name. “Tiny?” She looked up and there behind the register was her first boyfriend ever, Hal, from boarding school. She hadn’t seen him in nearly ten years.

“Hal,” she said. “How weird.” Hal had been the only person ever so far to break Justine’s heart, when she was seventeen, because of a transgression. You might call it Justine’s ur-transgression.