Her recklessness impressed him and made him want to keep her for himself; it cast a spell, it made him—he told her this and her eyes glittered—cannibalistic. “I want to eat you and eat you.” The feeling did not abate when he was back in Hawaii, away from her—it was passionate. She wrote him long letters. He never wrote back. She called, needing to talk. He hated the telephone. To satisfy her, and himself, he often flew overnight to San Francisco to meet her on weekends, spending two days in a motel room (pizza, wine, the shades drawn) without leaving. Then his return flight to Hawaii, and Stella back to her classroom teaching—“Women’s Studies,” “Gender Identity in Women’s Literature,” “Body Narratives in Feminist Films”—she who wanted to be a man. Her work meant nothing to him, yet he listened. He did not tell her he never read a book; he was grateful that she didn’t ask.

Her big question was, “Where is this leading?”

“You want to be like a man?” He laughed and held her by the shoulders in a guy grip. He said, “Men never ask that question.”

Yet he could not get enough of her. He told her he loved her, that he wanted to live with her, he promised her travel and adventure—all because he did not want to lose her. He would have told her anything just to be with her, to devour her, to watch her devouring him. He wasn’t sure it was love—he had never known love; but it was unmistakably desire. And this small, smiling, almost plain but richly smelling woman with a great education in the heat of passion was foul-mouthed, the hot words burned into his memory a vivid gift to him that helped him remember, like a loop of wicked music, so he could savor what they’d done, and made him miss her. She had a word—some new to him—for everything, words he could not spell and some he could barely pronounce: “fellatio,” “polymorphous perversity,” “rimming,” and “undinism.” “What you just did?” she would say, stretching her nakedness, her fingers dabbing at her lips. “It’s called irrumation.”

“You so hybolic,” he said, the one word she didn’t know.

He took less pleasure in dominating her than in willingly surrendering, his body almost unrecognizable to him, unexpectedly awakened, with the same slippery completeness he felt when he plunged into a wave, all his flesh gripped and transformed by the water, his mind soaring. Sex with Stella was like that, capturing him; and she became more odorous afterward.

She believed his extravagant promises, but in the end, after months of this, finally exhausting himself of his sexual frenzy that was like an illness, and freed to think straight, he said he could not marry her—“I’ve already done that!”