My mother gave him away.

I was at school. When I came home, there was on my desk a dimestore turtle swimming the shallow moat around a ramped plastic island—island of the plastic palm—in search of specks of lettuce.

Surely it is in part the medication, but we have hung our libidos on hooks outside the door. Do men play a version of the game women do, when a woman asks herself in, say, a shopping center, If I had to go to bed with someone in this store, which one would it be? Here, Warren is the best of the lot. If I can return to the high school mixer, a girl would go up to another girl and say of one of the boys, “He’s really cute.” And suddenly the girl to whom this was said, a girl who had not previously noticed this fellow, was taking another look and thinking to herself, “He is really cute.”

Where was I going with this? I mean to say that if Chatty said such a thing to me, I still wouldn’t see it, given a push.

That gorilla I met, the one who signs, was given a push, but it didn’t work. The people with whom she lives wanted her to mate. They brought in a suitable male, younger and larger than she, and set them up to cohabit. The female gorilla signed to him things like, “Hurry up” (and give her more bananas) and “Truck not yours” (a Tonka Toy truck). Neither gorilla would make a move, so the people rented an X-rated film and screened it for the primates. It held the gorillas’ attention, and when the film was over, the female gorilla signed to the male, “Climb up my back.” But he did not have her language skills, and did not otherwise take the hint.

My libido, what is left of it, flows in your direction. By the time I recognized you in the bookstore and boldly asked if I could buy you a cup of coffee, I had already constructed you in my mind, even though a voice in my head cried out: Don’t confuse the painting with the painter—let’s not forget the example of Picasso!

Given the hours I think of you, given the hours in my white-sheeted bed, you would think I could cook up a scene or two. But I can picture nothing that has not already happened. And so I am stuck with: a cup of tea in a public place on a winter afternoon. A failure of imagination? Or a self-protecting check, a screen blacked out when the home team plays.

Except I let myself imagine that you are painting my portrait. I offered myself as model to a teacher when I was a teen (having just read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). I worked up my nerve to do this—didn’t he sometimes paint nudes? But he painted me fully clothed. He painted me looking out a window, looking away. Yearning? The painter had just quit drinking. I was not what he was interested in.