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  “Are you sure?” Vincent asked. “You want to go so fast?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  He looked hurt by this answer.

  “I mean I don’t care if we rush things,” I said, and he gave me a lopsided grin.

  I stayed over at Vincent’s that night. At about two in the morning, I woke up to hear him talking in his sleep. The room was shrouded in darkness, and I thought at first the voice was emanating from a corner of my mind. I struggled to remember where I was beside this dreaming shape who spoke so reasonably about blue caviar and the hinterland. The more lucid I was, the less I understood. Vincent’s words fell upon my ears like music, then dropped into oblivion. A part of me was tempted to get up and write down everything he said, to discover his secret thoughts, the desires he hid even from himself. Who doesn’t wish to know the very heart of a person? But I was too lazy to stir from bed and preferred to drowse in the warm dark beside him. I tried to commit the stream of words to memory before falling asleep, but in the morning his sentences had disappeared along with my dreams.

  In early November, after the first snow had fallen, we went to hear Richard Goode perform in the chapel. Vincent suggested that we sit on the side balcony, where we could have a view of the pianist’s hands. He was appalled by the empty pews. In the city, Richard Goode’s concerts sold out regularly, but here in the village bounded by mountains and snow, hardly anyone had come. I didn’t mind the half-empty chapel. It seemed more intimate, and as Goode played a Beethoven sonata, I looked out over the audience, my attention drawn toward the high windows, the music filling the empty space of the chapel. I listened, and it sounded as if the heart were asking for something in a delicate way, making little excursions, taking desultory paths around the question, but what it wanted was something so small and particular, and always it kept returning to the same note, bittersweet and piercing. I could hear Vincent breathing as he sat close to me, our legs barely touching, and when he leaned forward with bowed head, I wanted to kiss the nape of his neck.

  I remembered how as a young girl I had restlessly wandered the woods behind my house. I had read books—Lucy opening the wardrobe, Alice falling through a rabbit hole—and felt the ordinariness of my life. Branches swayed, lifting and dropping tremendously, and I made myself dizzy looking up at them. I waited, but another world did not open. I grew older. I moved to different cities. I read and dreamed and looked out of windows. My hands and feet were always cold. I began to feel like a brittle doll sitting upright in a tiny chair. I wanted to be picked up and thrown out the window or smashed against a wall. If I were shattered and put back together again, I would be able to look any person fully in the eye.

  When we first started seeing each other, Vincent asked me a lot of embarrassing questions. He wanted to know about all the odd places where I’d had sex and then volunteered some stories of his own. One involved a dinner party. Between the main course and dessert, he and his date had separately excused themselves from the table and then met up in their host’s bedroom. “It was rude of us,” he admitted. “Everyone knew what was going on.” He then asked me if I’d ever done anything like that, and I told him I hadn’t.

  He also asked me what I liked in bed. When he saw me hesitate, he said, “It’s true that you have to be careful revealing your fantasies to someone. When you each know what pleases the other, then sooner or later it begins to feel scripted.” He was finally able to get it out of me that I wanted him to be forceful. “I like the idea of someone feeling strong desire for me,” I said. “I want to feel overwhelmed.”

  “A rape fantasy,” he said.

  “Hmm. I guess you could call it that.”

  As for Vincent, he liked women’s calves. He had purchased videos of women in short airy dresses and high heels walking slowly up stairs or stepping down the street and turning around with care.

  When we had sex now, Vincent was rougher with me. “I wasn’t sure I’d like it, but I’m really getting into this,” he told me. He pulled my hair and bit my cheeks and put his hand over my mouth as if he were trying to suffocate me. Sometimes it felt silly. And sometimes I bit and bruised him in return. A few times Vincent went too far, and I felt myself shrinking away from him. All the while, I felt we were getting closer.

  He once asked me why I was attracted to him. And I told him it was because he did things I’d never do. It was easy for him to cross boundaries, whereas I could never be so reckless. He reflected for a moment, then said, “You say this, but really I’m just a tweedy, bookish person who teaches high school kids.”

  Going to Amsterdam over spring break was Vincent’s idea. He had been there twice already. The first time he hooked up with his friend Anton, which surprised him, as he’d never been with another man. The second time he brought Lisa, the violinist with the shapely calves who later broke his heart when she dropped him for an older man. When I asked, Vincent said the trip with Lisa had been disappointing. She was too uptight. “A librarian type,” he said, smiling. “Just like you.”

  In Amsterdam, the black narrow houses along the canal looked like dollhouses tilting against the sky. I didn’t have to be on drugs to find the city unreal. The dark rows of old-fashioned bicycles, the bare trees and solitary lampposts, the green boats, the murky, glimmering water wherever we walked.

  We smoked White Widow and ate space cake, sucking on sugar cubes and drinking black coffee. We entered a store called Dream Lounge, and as Vincent looked at mushrooms beneath a glass case, I walked around the room, trying to pretend the floor wasn’t moving. It kept rising and falling beneath me. For a while, I stared at a sleek sculpture of a cat sitting on the counter. It had the menacing beauty of something alive, its body slippery and fine, the very pattern of its coat transcendent. The cat gazed at me with its round gold eyes, and I thought it was a presence from another world until it yawned. 1 stroked its head, and the cat purred automatically like a motor, but I knew it was afraid of me.

  Outside, I held on to Vincent’s arm, but this was like holding on to a stick in the middle of the ocean. Neither of us knew where we were going. Vincent had retreated into a numb insensibility, his steps heavy and flat, and I had lost my mind or whatever it was that had separated me from the world. A person could lead me anywhere in the city, and I would be unable to say no. We circled and passed the same storefronts like zombies, and I felt a rising hopelessness as I put one foot in front of the other.

  We gave up finally and went into a McDonald’s. “I need to sit down,” Vincent said. “Could you get me a cheeseburger?” He stumbled off to a booth and left me squinting under the bright lights. The man ahead of me in line kept turning around to stare at me. He knew I was sunk deep in some underwater reality. I stepped up to the counter, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak. “One cheeseburger,” I said carefully, and the cashier frowned. All the registers began to beep and flash — I was sure I had set them off—and the cashier informed me that they would deliver the cheeseburger to my seat.

  Vincent was slumped in a booth, his palms splayed out at his sides. He looked at me as I sat down and asked where the cheeseburger was.

  “They’re bringing it to us,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  I shook my head, afraid the man in the next booth was listening.

  “You aren’t going to talk?” Vincent asked.

  I shut my eyes, smiling slightly. This was a nightmare. I wanted to be back in our hotel room. The cheeseburger arrived, and I kept one hand over my face as I watched Vincent eat.

  “You’re acting very weird,” he told me. Then he began to sing: “Pa-ra-noi-a! Para-noi-a! Para-noi-a!”

  I got up from the booth and waited for Vincent outside. He seemed to take a long time finishing his cheeseburger. Everyone was looking at him as he attempted to throw away the wrapper on his tray.

  And then we were walking again through that unreal city of thin slanting houses and gray water. Amsterdam opened before us like an empty museum, drawing us into
its ever expanding ring of canals, a picturesque labyrinth of narrow streets and bridges, and all the while I couldn’t shake the presentiment that at the next corner something terrible awaited us. I pressed Vincent’s arm. Didn’t he see? We were separated from the world by only a fragile layer of skin. Our bodies were bubbles waiting to burst!

  “Is that so?” Vincent said.

  I wanted to go back to the hotel.

  “What are you hoping to find there?” Vincent asked.

  Peace and comfort. A place to hide.

  “That would be nice,” Vincent said. He took the map out of his pocket and peered at it, then stuffed it back into his coat. “Hopeless,” he muttered. “I can’t make any sense of it.”

  I squeezed his arm, and Vincent took the map out again and moved to the side of a building where there was more light. People walked by and looked at us. They knew we were lost and regarded us with contempt.

  “Our hotel is this way,” Vincent said. We walked several blocks before he realized the numbers were going in the wrong direction. We turned around, and I was afraid to look up at the houses. “Just a few more blocks, I promise,” Vincent said, but I didn’t believe him.

  And yet here was our hotel, and we were going through the revolving doors. I hurried past the receptionist, trying to still my face. She knew, of course, she must see this thing all the time. Oh, to get to our ugly little room, what a relief that would be, and I told the elevator to hurry, please hurry! Down the sober carpeted hallway and then Vincent fiddling with the door until it sprang open and I collapsed into a heap on the bed. Vincent stood in front of the mirror, trying to get out of his shirt, but his arms had gotten stuck somehow. “I can’t seem to take off my shirt,” Vincent said, and we looked at each other and burst into laughter. I rolled onto my stomach, and Vincent doubled over and fell to the floor, where he lay with his eyes closed.

  “Do you think we’re being too loud?” I asked after a moment.

  “Not at all,” he replied.

  I crawled off the bed and rested my head on his chest, and his fingers stirred my hair gently. “You should just give in,” he said. “That’s why you suffer. You’re fighting it when you should just let go.”

  “Just let go,” I said. “You make it sound so easy. But you might as well tell me to just let go and jump in front of a train. Just let go and throw myself off a cliff. I can’t help it if I have an instinct to preserve myself.”

  Vincent bugged his eyes and bared his teeth at me, and I let out a cry and covered my eyes. I had a sudden creeping sensation that the warm body I lay against was a stranger’s.

  “Come on,” he said. “You can open your eyes.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to get away from him, but I was too scared to move.

  “I promise I won’t make that face again.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  I opened my eyes, and he leered at me, showing his crooked bottom teeth. “You aren’t to be trusted,” I said, pressing my hands over my face. I felt my heart racing.

  He chuckled. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not coming to get you.”

  I heard a rustling sound close by but didn’t move. I knew he was trying to trick me, to scare me into opening my eyes. What was that sound? Like plastic crinkling. I imagined him smothering me with a plastic bag.

  “I guess this means you’re not going to sleep with me tonight?”

  Ha! That was the last thing I wanted.

  He made as if to get up. “Well, I can go away then.”

  “No, don’t go,” I said, lifting my head and gazing at him. I wanted to trust him, but people changed so quickly, and then it was as if you never knew them at all.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like it.” He put his arm over his eyes. “Stop looking at me.”

  I smiled. “But why?”

  “I don’t want to be examined like I’m some kind of specimen.”

  “But you’re such an interesting one.”

  “I knew it. You’re nothing but a voyeur,” he said. “If I were dying, all you would do is look on.”

  I blinked. “It seems I’m not the only one who is paranoid.” I pushed myself off his chest and got into bed, covering my head with a blanket.

  In the middle of the night I woke up and heard voices in the hallway. It was a low murmuring that I wanted, but failed, to understand. I imagined neighbors congregating outside our door, whispering about us. Any moment they would knock loudly and burst in. I closed my eyes but couldn’t stop the darkness from swelling inside me. An imperceptible crack had opened along my skull, and through this tiny hairline fracture, shadows seeped in to stroke and deform my thoughts. There could be no relief, no place to hide. I pressed my hands over my eyes, watching my thoughts darken and twist.

  In the morning, I woke up and saw a pearl gray light emanating from the edge of the curtains, felt the cool, clean sheets and the bland stillness of the furniture around me, and I knew immediately. My thoughts were clear, and I was in my right mind. I wanted to wake Vincent up to tell him, but instead I quickly dressed and left the room to take a walk.

  Outside, the air was crisp, the sky a delicate blue, and I felt the bright calm of the morning. A man on a bicycle passed by, reading a newspaper. I crossed over a bridge, looking at the bare trees and lilac brick houses reflected in the water, and then I stopped at a bakery, where I bought a chocolate croissant and a lovely round apple cake. I found some steps to sit on and devoured both. You could never find such good pastries in America, so delicious and beautiful, and inexpensive, too. The woman at the bakery had treated me with just the right courtesy, neither too warm or too cold, and I liked her sensible air, the neat green dress she wore, her shining coiled hair. Surrounding her were all the things she had made so perfectly that it was almost a shame to eat them. I returned and bought an apple cake for Vincent before I walked back to the hotel.

  Vincent frowned when I told him I had never appreciated my sanity before. I was going to remain delightfully sane for the rest of the trip. He could do as he pleased, but I wanted my mind to be clear.

  “You’re overreacting,” he said. “Last night wasn’t so bad.”

  “What are you talking about? It was a nightmare.”

  “But don’t you think it’s funny we ended up in a McDonald’s?”

  “It’s funny now.”

  “But remember how we laughed when we got back to the hotel room?”

  “Yes. But the rest was a nightmare.”

  “I was afraid you’d react like this,” he said, and he got up to take a shower.

  For the rest of the trip, I watched Vincent get high, and I suppose what he said about me was true. I had the curiosity and coldness to look on. I shepherded him about, giving him my arm, and he walked slowly and stiffly by my side like an old man. He told me about the luminous things he saw, how pale umbrellas glowed like jellyfish and pink flowers vibrated on a woman’s dress. But mostly he was silent, a tall, morose figure in his black coat, the sleeve on one side dangling lower than the other. When confronted with his own image in the mirror, he refused to look. What he wanted was to distort his senses, to numb himself from reality and keep it at bay, and I felt a loneliness watching him. What if life were to catch up with him and not let him go? At night, as we lay curled together, his arm around my waist, I placed his left hand against my breast and held it there until I fell asleep.

  We returned to New York, and there were small depressions in the snow, a faint glistening as it melted and revealed islands of green. I thought spring had finally arrived. But it snowed again, and it seemed like perfect winter landscape, everything covered in whiteness. Snow, like sleep, could make you oblivious to anything.

  Vincent broke up with me in June. At the end of July, I was driving to school one last time to clean out my classroom when I saw Vincent’s car a block ahead of mine. I turned down another street and w
aited silently by the side of the road until enough time had passed, and then I drove on to the parking lot and found him waiting for me.

  “Well, hello,” he said, smiling. “I have some good news.”

  “Oh, yes?” I said brightly. “What is it?”

  He told me that he had quit smoking. “My doctor said I would die of a heart attack by the time I was forty if I didn’t stop.”

  “But what about all those cigarettes I gave you?”

  “They’re still sitting on my dresser, but I haven’t touched them. I haven’t had a drink either. It’s too tempting to smoke if I have a drink.”

  “How dramatic,” I said.

  “It’s not really dramatic.”

  “I mean, all these life changes you’re making.” I couldn’t help but sound a little bitter. I looked down and saw his bare feet in sandals. I had never seen him wear sandals before, and the sight of his pale, bloated feet with a dull bluish cast to them repulsed me, and I was very glad for this feeling. “So do you suffer much?” I asked. “Is it true that you become a more boring person if you stop smoking?”

  “Every hour, I have a craving,” he said.

  “You should give me your cigarettes if they tempt you.”

  “They don’t tempt me.”

  “Well, give them to me anyway,” I said. “Maybe I’ll start smoking.” But even as I said this, I knew it wasn’t true. I would never become a smoker.

  We walked slowly toward the building, and I sensed that he wanted to continue talking to me just as I wanted to continue talking to him. He told me that he had gone canoeing on the lake by himself one afternoon, that he had taken to swimming laps in the pool, and I imagined him doing these things, living a more austere and reflective life of solitary, quiet pleasures. The reformed individual, the hedonist turned ascetic, living moderately and no longer indulging in sensation. And then it struck me that he was probably doing all this exercise to make himself attractive for a younger woman.