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My charge was a five-year-old boy named Kree Carey. The Careys lived in a house next to the one behind which Nabokov tried to burn the manuscript of Lolita but was stopped by his wife. “No historical marker to back me up,” Mark Carey lamented, “but I swear it’s true.” Mark and his wife, Helena, were librarians at Ithaca College, their house was full of books, they grew their own tomatoes and peas and eggplants in the front yard, cooked vegetarian meals, churned their own ice cream, and I loved them and took them for granted. Meatless breakfasts, homemade ricotta, no TV—this was what I expected from New York. The weather, too, was so foreign that it made sense: June evenings so cool I needed to buy a sweater at the Salvation Army store, June noontimes sunny and lovely as spring in Tennessee. One morning my mother complained via long distance it was ninety degrees in Nashville. That afternoon it rained in Ithaca and got cold enough to start the radiators knocking.

Kree was silly and rambunctious and liked to take his clothes off. At six every morning he moseyed into my tiny room wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and red boots, ready to face the day. I tried to take him to the city pool, but he couldn’t be convinced to keep his trunks on. If I turned away to pay for pizza, he was bare-chested when I turned back. In the end I gave up and took him to the Cascadilla Gorge where little kids skinny-dipped in the creek that ran through the middle of town.

One afternoon in early July I was sitting at the edge the creek, reading Lolita through sunglasses and hoping Kree and his friend Oscar weren’t masturbating under cover of the water.

A male voice asked, “Is Cornell up there?” I’d been in Ithaca for almost six weeks, but I was still amazed by the beauty of the gorge’s waterfalls and cliffs and the steps cut into the rock, beauty that was clearly amazing this guy with the strong jaw and the big eyebrows.

“It sure is.” I was pleased he’d mistaken me for a local.

He looked away from the falls, at me, and then over my shoulder. “Your kids are beating off,” he said, before starting up toward campus.

The next day Kree was with Oscar and his nanny, and I spent my afternoon off poking around the English department. The deserted halls of Goldwin Smith were cool and quiet and dimly lit. I read New Yorker cartoons on professors’ doors, peeked into empty classrooms, and tried to imagine what was soon to come. I ran into the guy from the gorge apparently doing the same.

“Hey. You found it.”

He looked confused. “Found what?”

“Cornell. Yesterday you asked me if it was up here. Remember? Then you told me Kree and Oscar were beating off.”

His face reddened and I smiled and stuck out my hand. “Hannah Guttentag.”

He smiled back and shook. “Frank Doyle.”

I liked the gap between his front teeth.

I showed him the Green Dragon, the coffee shop in the basement of Sibley Hall, ate late lunch with him at the Indian place right off campus where the Careys went on Wednesday nights, agreed to meet downtown for a beer and drew him a map on the back of a takeout menu.

I picked up Kree from Oscar’s house—his parents were two women, lawyers—and from one of Oscar’s moms received a report of the boys’ “self-pleasuring.” I’d read Helena’s books on child development and agreed with their authors it was a bad idea to tell Kree it was wrong to do what he and Oscar did, but I felt I needed to find a way to explain decorum and societal expectations to a five-year-old. Helena and Mark laughed when I told them all of this.

“Keep your pants on and your hands outside of them, at least in public,” Mark told his son.

“Okay,” Kree agreed, kicking off his shoes and struggling out of his shirt.

Masturbation was on my mind when I met Frank at the bar after dinner. Four beers later—and after much talk on various theories of sexuality, the role of autoeroticism in the development of young men and women, and the remarkable lack of self-love in serious literature—Frank paid the tab, and I led him to DeWitt Park, found a bench away from pedestrian traffic and streetlights, eased down his zipper, and pushed up my skirt. It was thrilling, like a return to junior year of high school and my first serious boyfriend, to a time of simple, electric sex, Wes Owen touching me in the backseat of his Ford Escort while I touched him. With the tips of two fingers, Frank gently rubbed my clitoris, the whereabouts of which had escaped Wes.

It was nice to be in the dark, sitting side by side, crickets chirping and lightning bugs rising and blinking, Frank’s free arm around my shoulders, his Levi’s rough against my bare right knee, my fingers atop his so we almost held hands as he brought me closer and closer and closer. Frank came first, pulsing in my fist and gasping through his teeth, and I quickly followed.

I left him in the park and walked home whistling, proud of myself for being too cool to demand a number, force a number upon him, suggest brunch. This was the new Hannah, Ivy League Hannah, Hannah who didn’t blink when told Oscar had two moms, Hannah who thoughtfully weighed the pros and cons of Kree’s public nudity, Hannah who listened to Helena and Mark groaning in their marital bed and idly wondered who was on top. New York Hannah, Cornell Hannah, Hannah whose Southern drawl was mysterious—no cowgirl hick from Tennessee. Hannah whistling “Every Day I Write the Book,” whistling “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.”