Loner

Chapter 8

My finger hovered over my laptop’s touch pad with the grave deliberation associated with launching a nuclear strike. It had been thirty-six hours since our evening at Lamont — more than enough time for a friend request on Facebook to seem an afterthought. We were both at Harvard, we lived in the same dorm, we’d “studied” together; this was a perfectly ordinary next step. After you accepted, I’d be able to view your trove of photos and status updates, maybe learn something that would help me win you over — similar tactics had panned out in a number of romantic comedies I’d seen — or at least discover where you were spending your nights.

I clicked.

I didn’t use the site myself except for voyeurism. I was friends with my high school and Matthews confederacies, a smattering of relatives, and the people who sluttishly befriend everyone on it. To avoid advertising the paucity of my social connections, I had hidden my list of friends and prohibited anyone from posting on my wall. Before arriving at Harvard, I’d hoped I would acquire such a bounty of comrades here that I could make my social media presence more transparent, perhaps even add the popular kids from Hobart High to show them how far I’d come. Yet for now I wasn’t eager to be seen in pictures with the Matthews Marauders nor to affirm my relationship with Sara, whose profile photo was of her at her high school graduation, flanked by her deliriously proud parents, off-kilter mortarboard dwarfing her head.

That night I studied with Sara after dinner at the Starbucks located in the Garage, the mini-mall in Harvard Square that seemed to cater to high school potheads. You hadn’t accepted my request yet. That was fine; maybe you were busy or took pleasure in leaving me in suspense. I tried to distract myself by reading even further ahead in the syllabus for my meeting with Samuelson.

“Why are you checking your phone every two minutes?” Sara asked. “What’s so important?”

“I’m just nervous about this meeting tomorrow with Samuelson,” I said.

She looked unimpressed.

“He’s probably the most important English professor here, which basically means the most important one in the country,” I added, and suggested we go home.

“You always sniff your jacket before you put it on,” she observed as we packed up.

“Do I?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Every single time. Does it smell or something?”

“Just routine, I suppose.”

“I guess we’re both creatures of routine,” she said. “Or obsessive-compulsion.”

I shuddered to think of the routinized trajectory we were on. If the two of us continued carrying on the habits that constituted our relationship, who’s to say we wouldn’t end up getting married, moving to Cleveland to be closer to her parents, and siring three children to replicate our family structures as I sentenced myself to a lifetime of buying CVS-brand zinc and date nights in mini-mall Starbucks.

While waiting to cross Mass Ave., cars whizzing past us, I had a sudden, unbidden image of pushing Sara into oncoming traffic.

You weren’t home when we went to sleep, and you still hadn’t responded on Facebook by the next morning when I knocked on Samuelson’s office door in the Barker Center.

“Hello?” he said, apparently having forgotten who I was.

“David Federman,” I reminded him. “Thank you for reading my essay on Ahab’s primal wound.”

That sparked some recognition in his eyes. He picked through a stack of papers on the desk.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, adjusting his glasses and nodding. “That was wonderfully cogent. The peg leg as readerly misdirection in Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale. A red herring, so to speak.” Samuelson let out a scholarly chortle. He spoke in the same cadences in conversation as he did behind a lectern. “The analysis of the leg as a figure of castration is very nuanced; usually these things become somewhat over-the-top, especially from male critics. I’m teaching a seminar on Hawthorne next semester. Mostly graduate students, but I think it might interest you.”

“That sounds up my alley,” I said. “Or up my galley, so to speak.” Samuelson chuckled again at the maritime pun. Wonderfully cogent, very nuanced. Six weeks in and already the star pupil in the Harvard English department. My fancy prose style wasn’t going over Samuelson’s head. It had finally found its proper audience, a potential mentor. I didn’t have to be a lawyer; I could be a professor of literature, wear one of those jackets with patched elbows, stroke my beard in an armchair and apply nuanced close readings without breaking a sweat. You’d stand by my side at stultifying faculty parties and jet around the world with me as I was crowned with laurels at academic conferences, joking with the awestruck attendees and protégés about how impenetrably dense my books were while shooting me a private look that said you did, of course, understand them (I had taught you so much), these are the self-effacing comments we must make so as not to appear full of ourselves, when can we get out of here and fuck in our hotel room?

Samuelson’s phone rang. “Excuse me, I have to take this,” he said, picking it up.

“No problem,” I said, taking out my own phone.

He cradled the receiver by his ear. “Thanks for dropping by.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, a little miffed all my reading prep was in vain, but that was fine — I would have plenty more opportunities in the spring. “I’ll be sure to sign up for the Hawthorne seminar.”

On my way out I stopped in the ground-floor Barker Café to order a cup of coffee. This is what a young literary mind did on campus: met with his professor in the morning and caffeinated himself for an afternoon of rigorous reading. I was about to leave when I noticed you in the corner, bowed over a table with your TF, Tom, presumably holding his own office-less office hours, with what had to be your—my—essay between you.

Riding high on Samuelson’s praise, I approached, though it was a cavalier move. For all I knew, my Melville essay had made the grad-student rounds, and alerting Tom to our friendship could put us in academic jeopardy if he’d identified the writing in your James paper as suspiciously similar to my own.

“Hey,” I said, standing over your table.

You looked up, uneasily, and casually pulled a notebook over the essay, as if to hide the evidence from Tom. Our little secret.

“Hi,” you said.

“David,” I said, addressing Tom. “I’m also in Prufrock. Harriet’s section.”

I paused to let him remember who I was.

“You’re lucky, you got the best one.” Tom scratched the underside of his beard. His eyes swerved to you. “The others tend to devolve into prurient discussions about nineteenth-century sexuality. Very juvenile stuff.”

You giggled.

This wasn’t how it was meant to go, with inside jokes from your section. You were supposed to ask what I was doing in Barker; I would blushingly admit that, well, I sort of just had my meeting with Professor Samuelson, I guess he wanted to see if I’d take his Hawthorne seminar in the spring; then Tom would say he was also taking it, he thought it was only for grad students, and he’d read my essay, too — well done, man, pull up a chair.

I waited for one of you to say something else.

“Your memory of poetry lines in class is impressive,” I said to Tom. “It seems like you’ve read just about everything.”

“I’m actually a robot,” he said. “I have no soul.”

Another giggle from you.

I evah on luos.

“Any chance you’re taking Samuelson’s Hawthorne seminar next semester?” I asked.

“No,” he said, sipping his coffee.

There was another stretch of dead air.

“Well, I should get going,” I said. “See you guys later.”

“Nice meeting you, Dave,” Tom said as I walked away.

After you had barely acknowledged me at the Barker Café, I wasn’t going to make another appearance in your room until you accepted my Facebook friendship. I told Sara I’d been having insomnia and needed to sleep in my own bed for a few days.

By Tuesday my request remained unanswered. If your delay was calculated, it was no longer cute. I wrote an entire essay for you; all you had to do was click a button or press on a screen.

I waited outside Harvard Hall before Prufrock with my copy of Sister Carrie. As you approached, I casually looked up and licked my finger to turn the page, my eyes briefly meeting yours before returning to the text, so captivated by my internal dialogue with Dreiser.

“You coming?” you asked at the door.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping in behind you and up the stairs. Samuelson was making his introductory remarks as we entered the room and took adjacent seats in the back row.

I spent the first half of class reacquainting myself with your olfactory presence. Then, as you jotted down Samuelson’s points about the amoral universe and deterministic plot twists of naturalism, you lifted a page in your notebook and readjusted your arm. Your left elbow, in the same black sweater as before, grazed the bottom of my triceps. My instinct was to reposition my arm out of politeness, but I resisted and stayed put. You left it there, the knob of your elbow applying faint, uneven pressure on me as you took notes with your right hand.

At first I thought you were unaware of it — and this was even more bewitching than the contact: that your indifference to others could translate into such corporeal obliviousness.

But you had to know. Maybe it was an accident initially, yet once it began, you were enjoying it, the subtle friction of two (clothed) body parts in public as a famous professor lectured. There was no one else in the room with whom you’d done this; I’d been watching, I would’ve known. You’d chosen me.

For the rest of class we stayed like this. Sometimes your arm would move to take notes farther down the page and create a centimeter of cooling space between us and I’d wonder if that was the end, but it wasn’t long before your elbow reunited with my arm. In a way, this was the most satisfying ecstasy I could imagine, suspended in a limbo state of not knowing and partial touching, the morsel on the tongue though not yet down the gullet.

When Samuelson’s lecture concluded, so did our dalliance: you abruptly withdrew your seductive joint and stood up to leave. The label of your sweater had flipped up and was poking out from the neck. ZIPPER & BUTTON, it said, upside-down and in reverse. NOTTUB & REPPIZ.

“Hey, did I add you on Facebook yet?” I asked as we bounced downstairs.

“I don’t know.”

“I feel like I did. Maybe a few days ago?”

“I always forget to respond to those.”

“Here, let’s put an end to your procrastinating ways,” I said. “Go on now and respond to all your friend requests.”

Outside, you turned to me, looking as if you were appraising me, wondering if you stood to lose any social status from accepting my invitation.

“All right,” you acquiesced, taking out your phone. I peeked at the screen. You did, indeed, have a slew of pending requests.

“There,” you said. “Now we’re the best of friends!”

“Yeah, BFFs,” I said with a laugh. “Or is it already plural, because it’s ‘best friends,’ so just BFF?”

“Dunno.”

“Well, have a good day,” I said, pivoting toward Matthews, pleased with what my pushiness had accomplished. Ask and ye shall receive.

“You aren’t going to walk with me?” you called out, sounding playfully hurt.

I stopped short. We’d already reached the endgame. I couldn’t contain a giddy hiccup. All that ostensible apathy to the Facebook request, and you wanted me to escort you across the Yard, flame-colored leaves crunching underfoot in the brisk October air, as if I were a Harvard man of yore walking his Cliffie to class. You’d chosen me again.

“What?” you asked in response to my laugh.

“Nothing,” I said. “I could kill some time.”

We strolled toward Sever. “Want a cigarette?” you asked, rooting through your bag.

“Isn’t smoking not allowed in the Yard?” I asked.

You laughed and lit up. “Such a rules follower.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have one.”

You passed me a cigarette and the lighter. Trying to evade the inevitable coughing fit, I sipped a wine tasting’s worth and spat it back out. It worked: a modicum of smoke I was able to store in my mouth that didn’t infiltrate my lungs.

We crossed paths with a Crimson Key member regaling a college tour with the three lies of the John Harvard statue (that it wasn’t modeled on its namesake; that the university wasn’t founded in 1638 but 1636; and that John Harvard wasn’t the founder but simply the first major benefactor). The centerpiece of the Yard, bronze symbol of educational aspirations, whose foot prospective students and tourists were invited to rub for good luck. (Harvard students, I found out upon arrival, sometimes urinated on it at night. John Harvard peed himself! I thought every time I passed it.)

I realized I was holding the cigarette like a joint. Fortunately, you were engrossed by the college tour.

“Ooh, sixteen thirty-six, not sixteen thirty-eight,” you scoffed under your breath as the guide concluded his spiel with a camp counselor grin. “What self-aggrandizing bullshit.”

I’d been one of those wide-eyed high schoolers, herded along with other antsy pre-frosh, crowding around the windowpane to catch a glimpse inside, sizing up the undergrads to crack the code, polishing John Harvard’s urinous foot in the hopes it would lead to my acceptance. Maybe it was good luck: just a year later, and they were all watching me breeze past them, with you, as we mocked their naïveté.

“How’d you do on your essay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten it back yet.”

“I thought you were discussing it with your TF when I saw you at Barker.”

“I was,” you said. “We were going over it. But he hadn’t graded it yet.”

“Did he have good things to say?”

“Yep.”

“Cool,” I said. “So, have you liked school this past week? And college? And how’s your semester going?”

The small scar on your forehead rose quizzically. I felt a shock of glee whenever something I said catalyzed its ascent, proof of my existence in your mental universe. And it was such an elegant forehead: an otherwise unlined quadrangle, the hairline sharply delineated against the skin, bypassing the fuzzy no-man’s-land that Sara had, whereupon it ceded to the sheltering forest of your locks.

“You pointed out people always ask how you like Harvard,” I reminded you. “Never just school or college.”

“Oh, that.” You took a meditative drag and the scar returned to its resting position. “You know. My horizons are broadening. The foundations of my worldview are shaking.”

I laughed too hard, a diaphragmatic bellow that sounded like an off-key horn.

And then a sobering sight: a hundred feet away, Sara walking to the library. That’s right; her Chilean politics class had just let out. I was getting reckless — we’d probably missed her by minutes last week.

I bent down to tie my shoe, deftly plucking the laces loose first with my free hand, turned away from Sara’s figure, and plugged the corner of my mouth with the cigarette. Leaning slightly so it didn’t look like we were together, I took more time than necessary retying it.

When I stood up Sara was far enough away, with her back to us.

“There goes your girlfriend,” you said, blowing smoke in her direction, wearing the impish smile from when you’d said veritas.

“Huh?”

You pointed with your chin. “Sara.”

“Oh,” I said, acting like I’d only just noticed her.

We pulled up to Sever. “Later,” you said, grinding your cigarette underfoot.

“Later,” I echoed, without the usual pang of loss when we parted ways. Now I could behold you from afar, on a screen, whenever I wanted.

In the privacy of my room I pored over your Facebook profile. There was no fodder for our budding relationship; you hadn’t listed any favorite cultural interests or other groups, and the posts you’d written on your own wall were spare and logistical. So much for my plans of bonding with you over my deep knowledge of esoteric films or bands.

Instead I waded into the waters of your photogenic past, skimming over close-ups of food and panoramic sunsets to linger on images of you. The majority depicted your life before Harvard: European cities, what appeared to be your family’s wraparound-porched oceanfront vacation home, a couple from childhood (wobbly on skis; crying on Santa’s lap), you and high school friends posing with tipsy hilarity at bars and nightclubs — entered with the benefit of fake IDs, I assumed, or city-girl know-how, or just because you were young and eye-catching and this was your Manhattan birthright.

The latest batch had been taken here, in dorm rooms and parties, with your handpicked beautiful people nothing like the factory-outlet Marauders. Several of the group shots featured you in intimate proximity to a guy I didn’t recognize from your Annenberg crowd. He looked older than the rest of your cohort, the adult at the kids’ table. His body language conveyed, more than mere ease, a sense of ownership: sturdy leg resting on coffee table, outstretched arms over sofa, squintily satisfied smirk.

Liam Barrows, he was tagged. His own Facebook page was private. All I could find on him was a single quote two years ago in the Crimson: “ ‘The changes to the dining hall will have little effect on my eating habits,’ said sophomore Liam C. Barrows, a resident of Adams.”

So he was a senior; that’s why he looked so much older than your friends. He could have anyone in the college, yet he’d zeroed in on a helpless-to-resist freshman girl, the sole demographic open to me. How greedy — like a billionaire winning the lottery.

When I came home from the library that night I heard music from Steven’s room. “Always on My Mind” was playing on repeat. It was irritating, and I wondered if he had left it on accidentally. After the seventh cycle, I rapped on his door.

“One minute” came his voice from inside. The volume dropped and he appeared. His face was as pink as raw hamburger, his eyelashes matted and wet.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Ivana and I,” he croaked, “we… we…”

He swallowed without finishing.

“You broke up?”

He closed his eyes and nodded as if confirming a death.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, and I was: his relationship with Ivana had kept him out of the suite.

The ends of his lips sagged gravely as he fought off tears. It was disconcerting to see him this way. I’d known Steven only to be relentlessly chipper about everything: the weather, whatever was on the menu, all the people he knew. (“Isn’t he awesome?” he’d declare about each acquaintance who stopped by our table to say hello.)

He waved me into his room and crumpled into the bean bag chair, where he delivered a long-winded, unsolicited account of how his and Ivana’s romance for the ages had met its demise.

It wasn’t him, it was her. She didn’t want to be tied down her freshman year and thought they should see other people. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She loved him but this was the best thing for both of them. Each cliché prompted vocal ruptures and a welling up. I responded on cue with my own platitudes lifted from movies and TV shows: he’d done nothing wrong, there were other girls out there who would appreciate him more, it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

“She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known, inside and out,” he said. “And she really got me.”

Up to this point I’d managed to affect a look of sympathy, but here I nearly laughed. Forget the absurd notion of her contending with you for that title: Ivana was, by even the most charitable judgment, so distant from the winners’ circle, way up in the cheap seats, that one might almost suspect Steven of mockery.

“She’s cute,” I said, “but the world is filled with cute girls. You’ll find someone better.”

“I don’t want anyone better,” he said. “I want her.”

“I mean better for you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want another relationship.”

“Well,” I said, “you’ll feel better in the morning.”

He nodded through his phlegm production. “I should call my mom back,” he sniffled. “But thanks for being here for me.”

“Sure,” I told him.

As I headed toward the door, he stood and intercepted me with a hug. “You’re a good roommate,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said, wriggling out of his embrace and ducking back into my room. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind keeping the music down.”

Steven recovered like an inflatable clown punching bag. “I realized we’re not one hundred percent compatible, and I should find someone more suited to me, and so should she,” he told me two days later. “And don’t worry — we’re going to make sure nothing’s weird between us, so we can all hang out like before. Ivana and I decided the most important thing is the unity of the Matthews Marauders.”

Thank God for small mercies.

On Friday evening Sara and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She kept asking what I thought about the European collection, assuming I was now an expert in the visual arts thanks to my Renaissance to Impressionism class. I answered to the best of my midsemester survey-course abilities but gave evasive or fabricated responses to questions that flummoxed me. To compensate, I pointed at a subway advertisement during our ride home.

“Look at that ad,” I told Sara. “See how it shows just the woman’s mouth eating the candy bar? It’s isolating the one non-taboo main orifice, which takes in an edible object that becomes a phallic substitute. Now check out that bank ad. Male mouths are rarely eroticized. Instead, they’re used to imply speech or some other kind of power.”

“That’s pretty insightful,” she said. “Most guys don’t pick up on stuff like that in everyday life.”

I shrugged. “I guess I’m not like most guys.”

“Yeah.” She kissed my cheek. “You’re definitely not.”

When we reached Matthews my eyes traveled up to your fifth-floor window, warm with apricot light. You were home.

Our plan was to watch Dumbo; when Sara had found out I’d never seen it she insisted upon a screening. But first she had to finish editing a high school student’s college essay. The tutoring organization she volunteered for matched Harvard students with Boston-area youth from underserved communities.

“I wish I could disable the thesaurus function from my kids’ computers,” she said. I looked up from my Dickinson book and at her screen, where she’d highlighted a sentence: “In college I will continue to prevail over my trials and tribulations and conquer adversity as I metamorphose my dreams into a reality.”

“That’s really bad,” I said. “I hate to say it, but are you really doing a favor helping someone who writes like that go to a good college? Won’t they be in over their head?”

“First of all, she’s not trying to get into Harvard. Second of all, it’s over their heads. And when you feel like criticizing someone, remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”

“I used ‘they’ because I didn’t know the writer’s gender. And I haven’t had all the advantages. Compared to some people.”

“You have, hugely,” she said. “And I said ‘all the people,’ not ‘all the advantages.’ It’s the beginning of The Great Gatsby. Don’t you remember the opening line?”

“It’s been a while since I read it. I think it was, like, seventh grade,” I lied. “It’s the last book on the Prufrock syllabus. I’ll be rereading it soon.”

“You’ll be breeding it soon?”

“I’ll be re-read-ing it soon.”

“You’re a real mumbler, you know,” she said.

We were lying on the bed, about to start the movie on her laptop, when you came out of your room. That was our riotous Friday nightlife on display for you: Dumbo, my Dickinson anthology on the floor, tickets for an upcoming performance of the Boston Philharmonic thumbtacked to the corkboard. Just a couple of unruly college kids.

“David,” you said as you passed by. Sara and I looked up, both incredulous that you would address me. “Do you know what this week’s reading is?”

“Emily Dickinson,” I replied.

“Cool.” You stepped into the hallway. “See you in class.”

It was completely unnecessary for you to ask me, right then, as you were leaving to go out. You were throwing your weight around, letting Sara know she had some competition.

“I didn’t know you were in class together,” Sara said a minute into the opening credits.

“We didn’t realize it until this week,” I said. “It’s a pretty big class.”

I followed her to it during shopping period. If I could have, I would have signed up for her other classes, too. I stayed up all night writing an essay for her while I lied to you. I’m only here because she sleeps in the next room.

Feeling Sara’s gaze on my face, I yawned.

“Did you guys sit next to each other or something?” she asked, yawning contagiously.

Yes, because I waited for her late arrival, and she intentionally rubbed her elbow against my arm, and she asked me to walk her across the Yard, and I saw you but tied my shoes so you wouldn’t see me.

“No, we just saw each other when we walked out,” I said. “Look, the movie’s starting.”

I snuggled closer to her and she dropped it. Sara teared up during the sequence when Dumbo’s mother cradles him with her trunk through the bars of her cage.

“I should’ve warned you,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I always cry during this scene.”

The awakening of an erection. I was disturbed by the lack of obvious stimuli — the main on-screen visual was the animated elephants’ non-pathetically phallic trunks — but when Sara’s tears grew more pronounced, I noticed, so did my penis. To allay it, I looked at the nearby Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America. (I’d gotten about a hundred pages into it by now, all during sessions on Sara’s bed; it was more interesting than its dry title promised, an engaging primer on both specific Latin revolutions and the precepts of Marxism.)

“You didn’t find that sad?” Sara asked when the movie ended.

“It’s an animated kids’ movie,” I told her.

“You never seem to get moved by any of the movies or plays we watch.”

“Who gets moved by plays?”

“I do.”

“Guys don’t cry during plays,” I said.

She studied my eyes, as if plumbing their depths might solve the mystery of me. “You don’t even laugh all that much. Like real laughs.”

“I laugh at your jokes,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. I always at least smiled at them, but it was a forced response to the concept and effort, and I often had to remind myself to emit a polite chuckle.

“I should hope so.” She tapped my forehead with her finger. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. “Who’s in there?”

S’ohw ni ereht?

“No one,” I said in the automatonlike voice. “I’m actually a robot. I have no soul.”

“It’s a joke,” I added when she didn’t react.

“I feel like there’s a lot you bottle up inside,” she said gently. “I wish you’d let it out with me.”

“Would you really want some guy who’s uncontrollably weeping all the time?” I asked, thinking of Steven after his breakup.

“Maybe you’ve got a point,” she said with a short laugh. Then a hesitant undertone crept into her voice. “I told my parents about you.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“How smart and thoughtful you are. How you’re the one person here I feel like gets me.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“They want to meet you.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I thought maybe you could visit Cleveland over winter break.”

“Sure, that’d be fun,” I said, imagining the bleak prospect of being snowbound in Cleveland with the Cohens. “Let’s talk about it closer to the break. My family might be upset over losing time with me.”

“Do your parents know about us?” she asked a minute later, shyly averting her eyes.

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t spoken to my mother since that phone call before the Ice Cream Bash and had relayed only bare-bones, predominantly academic data about my life over e-mail. “Well, just my mom. I figured she could tell my dad.”

“And what did you tell them about me?”

“The same stuff, pretty much,” I said. “Smart and thoughtful. Quotes Great American Novels to buttress her arguments.”

She mussed the part in my hair. “Buttress,” she said, smiling. “I should disable your thesaurus function, too.”

She left for the bathroom with her toiletries. Reliably hygienic Sara, who always brushed and flossed and rolled on clinical-strength antiperspirant before bed. Sara Cohen, who wanted me to visit her and her family in Cleveland, the only one who wanted me to let everything out with her.

There was a lot you bottled up, too. I knew hardly anything about you beyond what I’d seen on the Internet. I didn’t even know what your room looked like.

Without having thought it through, I found myself turning your doorknob.

I remained inside the doorframe. The swath of light that seeped in from Sara’s room outlined a path to your bed, where creamy sheets lay rumpled under a white comforter. The walls were bare except for a single canvas painting with an abstract design. A Turkish rug sprawled across the floor, a few articles of clothing strewn about it.

Sara would be back soon. As I shut the door, something slipped to the floor on the other side. Your robe. It had slid off the peg attached to the door. After hanging it back up, I buried my nose in the interior folds, the material that had recently been in contact with your nude skin. Rubbing the belt, my fingers came across an imperfection. Upon closer examination, I discovered it had, at one end, its own small VMW monogram.

I extracted the belt from the robe’s two loops, balled it up, and stuffed it in my pocket as a souvenir.

I was already between Sara’s pink flannel sheets when she came back. As we carried out our nocturnal routine I thought of the silk resting in my pocket. When I ejaculated, I spasmed six times on her stomach, as if discharging a revolver of all its bullets. Sara reached for the shirt she’d demoted to a rag for the cleanup of these skirmishes. It featured an illustration of a feathered quill crossing a blade with the cursive inscription THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD. She regularly laundered it, but it built up a mushroomy odor between washings as it putrefied in its airless bedside-table drawer, and the blue cotton was now marbled with semen stains. The penis mightier than the sword, I thought with creative kerning each time it came out as I pictured the nib of a retractable ballpoint pen emerging like an uncircumcised penis.

The next morning I hid the belt in my drawer. But before I left for brunch I snipped an inch off the tip where the small VMW monogram was stitched, tucked it into the fifth pocket of my jeans, next to the Lactaid pills, and throughout the day I stroked it with my index finger.

I anticipated your reaction when I’d eventually “find” the belt under your bed. You wouldn’t remember the missing monogram by then; you’d simply be grateful. How irksome it was to lose one small but integral piece from a larger item — a screw from an IKEA chair, the drawstring of a hooded sweatshirt, an ace from a deck of cards. Once it was gone, it could feel impossible to make the thing whole again, as if it were permanently doomed to a semi-functional life.