She closed her eyes. She thought of Duke back in the States—that poor, sweet, easygoing Duke who would have been the last guy in the world to want to bring her pain. And yet he had because he was a man, and she, no matter what she did to her brain and willpower, was still inhabiting a female body. Just one night that she forgot a pill, and this was what happened. She thought of her mother’s jokes about “Who pays the fiddler? The girl pays the fiddler.”

Yes, the goddam fiddler. He was always there waiting to be paid, just like the goddam doctor counting his money. He was there every time a man looked at her, every time she felt the surge of pleasure from an embrace, every time bed beckoned. Pleasure, even if it didn’t always end in pregnancy, was always a trap. How often she had thought, I will be chaste and do my work. And how often she could not be, because it was in her nature to love and be loved. And then she thought of the graffito in the New York subway that she had seen scrawled on the poster of a Broadway play: “Love hurts,” someone had written with a magic marker.

“Cara, are you all right?”

Tina heard Angela’s voice near her and opened her eyes. Angela took Tina’s hand in one of hers and with the other wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. Only then did Tina realize she was wet with sweat.

“I’m all right,” Tina said. “We can go.”

“You were really brave,” Angela said. “The doctor said so.”

“Screw the doctor,” said Tina. She did not want to tell Angela about Marco. All men were alike—what would she have told Angela that Angela didn’t already know?

With Angela and Marco on each side holding her arm, they left the doctor’s office and stood outside in the corridor ringing for the elevator in its elaborate wrought-iron cage. Nothing came. Marco peered down the shaft. “Someone must have left a door open down there and it won’t move,” he said.

“Can you walk down?” Angela asked. “It’s better if we get away from the doctor’s office as soon as possible before we’re noticed. He might get reported.”

Halfway down the stairs, Tina remembered her pink silk panties in the bathroom and began to cry.

“Su, cara!” Angela murmured, putting her arm around Tina’s waist and pressing her close for a moment. “It’s over—you’ve been magnificent. Just a few minutes more till we get to the car.”

Angela had finally double-parked in front of the building entrance and left her parking lights on with the flashing signal.