She turned up the ends of her mouth to seal her opinion, hoping the conversation wouldn’t go any further because they’d argued several times about his distance from Miss Gita. She’d said to him quite often that he resented all women because he resented his mother. To which he’d often replied that she was defending her because she was a whore as well.

He was thinking of this now as she began to undress.

Fuck, they would have to be quick, he thought. Phil would be returning from the parade soon. And he didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The poor boy was naïve enough to believe that Margaret would be faithful.

“Do you want me to strip for you?” she asked, taking a sip of merlot. She smacked her lips, which were painted a coppery brown.

“We don’t have time,” he said, feeling bad for Phil momentarily. He was too nice. He didn’t deserve this.

He was feeling the heat of her lips from a distance. Those lips, he thought. Those lips.

A few days after she’d said she would never screw him again, she came to see Phil and did everything to get in his way, to rub it in. Walking around half clothed and shit.

As he lay in bed resting, he heard them in the sleeping bay above the kitchen, then on the stairs, then on the bed beside him while he pretended to sleep. He heard her moan. Heard her sigh. Heard her tell Phil to come in her mouth. Heard her slurp and swallow through these same lips.

But he didn’t respond. He held it in.

He would break her, he knew. And he had. She’d apologized afterward. By phone and in a letter. But that wasn’t the proof he needed. This was it. She was peeling the shirt down to her waist, revealing a white teddy into which her body was poured like a cup of coffee. Her breasts spilled over the top like cream on mugs of cappuccino.

You’re such a nasty bitch, he thought. He felt the urge to smack her. Which drove—or was it driven by?—his need for her to hold him and rock him and tell him that she loved him best and not Phil and that he didn’t have to worry about Miss Gita, because she would mummy him whenever he needed. As he watched her slide out of the rest of her clothes he found himself comparing the woman he’d first met with the one in front of him, the one with the fleshy hips who was lying topless on the bed in a transparent G-string, the one whose fatness pulled the spit into his mouth like the breast of a roasted chicken.

It was 1985, Ian remembered. Fire had just moved to London, and he’d begun to make a name for himself. It wasn’t a spectacular meeting. He saw her in a Paris metro station, followed her onto the train, and slipped her a drawing that he’d made of her while she stood on the platform—an opening flush that had served him well in the past. Five stops later she agreed to meet him for dinner. And the next evening he arrived at the restaurant with flowers and high expectations and met her boyfriend, whom she’d invited. She was from St. Louis, he discovered over dinner, and her boyfriend from Tallahassee. They were music students at Berklee—she in jazz piano and he in trumpet—and they were both traveling outside America for the first time. There was an endearing greenness to them, a provincialism that he liked because it defined him as cosmopolitan. So he adopted them for the rest of their stay, which was three months, and they willingly surrendered authority. He picked up the tab at meals, took them to galleries and museums, and drove them out to the country in his Alfa. Then he moved them into his apartment for the last three weeks because they ran out of money. That’s when he began to spend time with her, because her boyfriend continued to move with a crowd of posey Americans that he’d met at their hotel.