The car was the silver of a polished mirror. Even on that cloudy early morning, light bounced off its hood in narrow, wolfish angles. In its window’s reflection stood Philip and me with our similar heights, though I wore the hoodie and slouch I always did while he had on a button-down that stayed crisp despite hours of international travel. He dropped the keys into my hand.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to,” Philip said.
His sunglasses were mirrored, too, and with his smile and perfect posture, the cloud white of his hair, he looked like a politician or movie villain.
On a nearby runway, planes angled into the air.
“Why are you handing them to me?” I asked.
“I asked back in New York if you were a confident driver,” Philip said. “And you answered with some story about a car you’d had and sold. What color was it again?”
“You shouldn’t ask questions you know the answers to either.”
“Cheap-stripper blue,” Philip said. “I remember the words. I just don’t know what they mean.”
“What do you think they mean?”
“Europe has made you assertive, young man.”
“We haven’t even left the airport.”
“Well then,” Philip said. “I suppose I’ll need to gird myself for whatever new you is about to emerge. I asked because I need someone who can drive well. I haven’t driven in years.”
“Not Andrew? Amy? Adam? Everyone who works for you has names that begin with an A.”
“Three people.”
“So they don’t drive?”
“Not well,” Philip said. “Also…” He pursed his lips, and I sensed he was deciding how much of his hand to show. “They wouldn’t have appreciated it.”
“Because they’ve been to Europe before and I haven’t?” I asked.
“We should get going,” Philip said.
The car was a stick shift. My ex, Alan, had had one and taught me its basics, the two of us in a parking lot late at night, Alan telling me when to shift up and down. I pulled onto the main road. Cars buzzed past, and I switched to a higher gear.
“Garish, I imagine,” Philip said.
“Bright, too,” I told him. “Cheap strippers, they want to be noticed.”
A sign told us that Geneva was six kilometers away. We zipped through a tunnel, emerged to a wall of dense shrubs on either side of us. The announcer on the radio spoke in quick, purring French, and Philip translated things about trade deals and a new reality show. A volcano that had been written off decades before coming back to life.
I dropped Philip off at the lakeside Four Seasons, then went to the cheaper hotel I’d found for myself a few blocks away (my last-minute addition to the trip meant many of the hotels where Philip would be staying were already at capacity). The place where I was staying sat on a busy, charmless street. At its front desk, a woman battered by fluorescent light addressed me in French. I spat out one of the few phrases I’d memorized from the dictionary Philip had lent me: “Je suis désolé.” Her face dulled as she switched to my mother tongue.
The elevator was barely big enough for me and my duffel bag. It had a gate I had to pull.
My room had a single bed and a television bolted to the wall. Traffic growled through its window. Still, I was in Europe for the first time, and wanted to take advantage of that, to leave my hotel’s derelict street and return to Philip’s, full of storefronts shaded by colorful awnings and window boxes bursting with flowers and facades of warm, clean stone.
Philip had told me to let him nap until four, so I wandered. I passed wrought iron balconies, their railings curlicued and lacy-looking, shops that seemed to have been extracted from a quainter era. Streetcar wires clanged in the wind, and people young and old glided down the streets on bicycles. Their jackets and hair lifted behind them, faces ruddy with cardiovascular satisfaction. But this storybook quality was interrupted when a moped buzzed next to a woman on a bike and plucked her purse from its basket. The woman screamed. Other cyclists raised hands and voices in protest. I checked to make sure my wallet and passport were safely in my pocket.
A block later, I met a man walking a dog. The man had grayish eyes and dark hair, a lean fitness I liked. I knelt down. The dog trotted toward me. The man’s face lit up with an amused, coy smile. Afternoon sun gilded his face.
“Cute dog,” I said.
The man’s smile faltered, and he shortened his pet’s leash. The dog snorted in surprise.
“Chien,” I added, pulling that word from God knows where, then, “Je suis désolé.” The man and his dog went on their way. I pulled the dictionary from my pocket to scour its list of useful phrases, then closed it, reciting as many as I could remember.
I walked through the marble-floored lobby of Philip’s hotel, a sunset mural busying its ceiling. With a coffee for him in hand, I knocked on his door.
Philip’s room was large, with a balcony that overlooked the lake. Outside, the sun fought through the clouds, its light pebbling the water.
“You brought me coffee,” Philip said.
“It was in the lobby,” I answered, and placed it on one of his room’s many tables.
I sat down, the frays and stains on my jeans magnified by the sofa’s pale fabric. Philip noticed me noticing and asked, “Did you bring anything less lived-in?”
“I think so,” I said, though the only good clothes I’d packed were those he’d rejected at their first party. Sensing my discomfort maybe, Philip asked me about my first European afternoon. I talked about the robbery I’d seen, my failed flirtation without a common language.
“Not that you need that, per se,” Philip said, and told me he was going to hop into the shower. I didn’t know if I should stay or leave.
He came out a few minutes later in a white robe, a buffed shine to his hairless legs, and the confusion as to why I’d been invited on this trip grew. Nicola might have told him about the barn. Philip might have assumed I’d understood what agreeing to come really entailed. I tried to warm myself to the idea of sleeping with him, though as I looked more closely, I noticed his thick toenails, their edges the yellow of an old photograph, and the wiry white hair clinging to his collarbone and hoped that his admiration’s steady light would carry me through a fuck or two unscathed. Philip slathered his face with moisturizer. He looked out at the houses peppering the lake’s far shore. When he turned back to me, I stood, unsure if he was about to kiss me or make a comment about my clothes, unsure, too, which I would have preferred. But he just smiled and said, “The jet lag will pass,” then told me about the collectors he was having dinner with that night, his description making it clear he’d be going solo. Maybe my clothes had led to a demotion.
“I can entertain myself,” I said.
“I have no doubt,” Philip said. “But I’d love for you to help me find my way there and back.”
His cheeks were red from shaving. Water clung to his hair in crystalline beads.
“Meet me in the lobby in half an hour,” Philip said.
I sat in the lobby next to a towering, fragrant floral arrangement. Guests drifted past, and the reception desk’s phone trilled with quiet regularity.
“Bonjour,” a woman said.
She had on a white shirt and gray pants, a hotel name tag shiny on her lapel. I looked at my ratty jeans, then back at her, angry at the question I suspected would come next.
“I’m waiting for Philip Belshaw,” I said.
She nodded. “May I get you a coffee? Perhaps a glass of wine?”
“Sure,” I said, though when she asked what kind of wine, I answered, “Whatever’s easy.” She listed several. “The first one,” I said, not knowing if it was white or red. As I drank expensive wine (it was white), I grew angry at the judgment people passed when they saw me, though if I’d understood the world as they did, I wouldn’t have dressed this way even when I scrubbed my toilet. Philip had probably never scrubbed a toilet. Even as a kid, he’d surely had people to drive him places and clean up his messes and iron his clothes so everything always looked perfect, even when he wasn’t leaving the house.
I finished my wine in a few large swallows.
Three days before, Philip had explained to me that Nicola couldn’t go with him on the European business trip they’d planned. We sat at their kitchen island. One of the dogs was just out of sight, lapping water from its bowl.
“Too much happening at the gallery,” Philip said.
He picked up a stack of magazines and tapped it against the counter.
“So my passport,” I said, and took it from my pocket.
“Good. You’re going with me instead.”
His eyebrows sloped toward each another in a sharp V.
“You’re not free?” he asked.
“Of course I’m free,” I answered, and his brow retreated.
That night, I called June. She told me a small part of Dad’s heart had died in the attack, but there was hope for recovery. She asked if I might visit, and I told her, “I’m currently in a foreign country,” though I was in Brooklyn still, deciding what to pack.
“The connection sounds like you’re next door,” she said.
“Progress,” I told her, and asked if Dad could talk. She answered no, that she was at home. I was bothered by her attempt to lure me back, also the negligence of her being home rather than by her husband’s side. Everything made me angry then, and I couldn’t imagine the sliver of rightness that would have satisfied me. I had wanted to tell Dad about Europe, for his holy zeal to drop long enough so I could hear the thrill in his voice at the prospect of me in fancy hotels and driving on roads bound together by kilometers rather than miles. But when I asked June if I could call Dad directly, she said that they hadn’t paid for a phone in his room. It was expensive, and everyone who wanted to talk to him was already there.
I was about to hang up when June said, “He talks about you every day.”
“I’ll call again,” I said.
I knew I should have promised more meaningful action, or at least offered contrition. But my first trip on a plane and to Europe crowded out any better answer, wanting all I could consider, the weight of it in my hands, its tingle in my throat as it moved close to becoming real.
“He’ll look forward to hearing from you,” June said, then hung up.
I shoved the clothes I’d chosen into my duffel bag.
Philip had a terrible sense of direction. On our first night in Geneva, I walked him to a restaurant five minutes from his hotel, and he was shocked by how close it was and the ease with which I got us there.
“When I first moved to the Village,” he said, “all those strange, angled streets. I was lost all the time. Walking in circles, or more like rhombuses.”
Philip sometimes turned himself into the butt of a joke, but carefully. Even when he remarked on his terrible sense of direction or mentioned a passing man too striking to give him even a small scrap of attention, Philip still steered things. A woman in a crosswalk spoke to him. He answered back in French that sounded baritone and feminine at the same time.
“What did she want?” I asked.
“To compliment my scarf.”
It was steely gray, folded in a way that made me think of a book on knots I’d once read.
“It is nice,” I said.
“We should get you one,” he answered.
“I don’t know that I can afford it,” I said.
Philip didn’t reply, and I felt the stifling weight of the rules I didn’t know, though even as I pictured the sad, clueless version of me that I cultivated and blamed, I understood that in mentioning my slender means I was fishing for his interest or assurance or a touch on the arm.
“This is the restaurant,” I said.
The place had a giant kitchen diners could peer into, tables ringed in elegantly punitive chairs. Philip adjusted his scarf and tucked his hair behind his ears. It was like watching an actor walk onstage, dropping into character just as the light hit him.
I went to a bar with soccer on the television and ate a sausage stew. When I got back to Philip’s restaurant, I found him outside waiting.
“Where’s our car?” he asked.
“We walked here,” I said.
The street’s dim lighting exaggerated his aggravation.
A cab passed. Philip raised his hand, and it pulled over.
Without thinking, I said, “I’ll walk.” Sensing I was being childish, bratty even, I added, “Just need a bit of fresh air before bed.”
Philip got into the cab without looking back at me.
After returning to my hotel, I climbed into bed. And though my eyes ached from their hours of uninterrupted work, each time sleep crept close, annoyance at Philip’s own annoyance returned, along with annoyance at the way he’d stood in his bathrobe that afternoon so I didn’t know what he planned to do with me.
We moved on to Zurich, then a night in Stuttgart, Philip going to an event with someone he called the Countess, though I wasn’t sure if that title was real or a joke. I spent hours waiting in the car outside grand houses or museums, saw the itch of Philip’s disappointment when I drove down streets strangled by traffic or showed up at a different time than he’d wanted or when, once, he climbed into the car and I had the radio playing a pop station and he huffed before saying, “Why is this young woman moaning like she’s injured?” When I answered with a joke about the particulars of her injury, his brow rose in shock that I’d thought his question had been anything other than rhetorical.
The more Philip aimed his disappointment at me, the more thoughts of my ailing father took on the warm patina of missed opportunity. Me sitting by his hospital bed while machines beeped and nurses floated in. The forgiveness he’d ask for in a pleading whisper. But each time quitting and flying back early felt like my next logical step, Philip would share a moment of kindness or express relief that I’d gotten him to some hard-to-find restaurant, and that need to flee would vanish as fast as it had appeared.
On the drive to Munich a few days later, I confessed to Philip that I hadn’t been able to find a cheap hotel where I could stay; I’d been told there was a conference in town. He fiddled with a dashboard vent. On either side of us, a dense thicket of suburbs.
“You mean to tell me you’ve been staying in dumps?” Philip asked.
“I wouldn’t call them dumps,” I said.
“What would you call them then?”
“Adequate.”
“For the next few nights,” he said, “we’ll get you a more suitable room.”
I considered telling Philip how I lived back in New York but didn’t want his pity. We drove past short-shorn fields and a grid of dark pines, a cluster of close-knit houses.
That night, Philip at a dinner, I wandered. I smoked several cigarettes while standing on a bridge, the dark river sliding underneath me. As people passed in duos and trios, homesickness gathered steam, for Janice, and Dad’s rambling messages, for my mom who played the same songs over and over when she was in a mood. I found an internet café and paid to sit in one of its booths to make a long-distance call. I dialed Dad’s, got the machine, so tried my aunt in Phoenix instead. Mom had been staying there since the end of her latest engagement.
“Gordon,” my aunt asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just haven’t talked to Mom in a while.”
My aunt Frances, a thin, nervous woman, was high up at the local electric company.
“I’ll say,” she said. “How’s Minnesota?”
“Hot, I imagine. But I’m not there.”
As I told her about my job, my recent days in Europe, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my mother since I’d moved to New York.
“Your mom doesn’t live here anymore,” my aunt said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing happened.”
Outside the booth people crouched in front of computers, screens turning their faces an anemic blue.
“She has an apartment a few miles away, a job answering phones at the Y.”
“She hates talking on the phone,” I said, hoping we might commiserate, searching for familiarity’s steady grounding. But my aunt ticked her tongue, and I knew she wouldn’t help me.
“It’s a job, not a pleasure cruise,” she said, then gave me my mother’s new number.
I stood outside the restaurant until Philip’s guests left and felt like a mistress. Felt sick, too, of worrying about his frustration, so I asked him, “What’s the male version of mistress?”
“Lucky, I suppose,” Philip answered, then told me he could smell cigarette smoke on me.
“I’ll walk farther away,” I said.
I wanted him to tell me that taking me on this trip was a mistake, for me to fly home early in one of the smaller seats I’d spied behind us on the trip over. To then visit Dad and tell him and June and the nurses about the whims of the rich, their impossibility.
Philip hooked his arm in mine.
“I actually love the smell,” he said. “It reminds me of when I smoked, which I did for decades, like a fiend. When I smell it, young man, I miss it terribly.”
We paused at a store with purses in its windows. Philip’s white hair, my dark, messy mop showed in reflection.
“You can smell me whenever you want,” I said.
“The things you say,” Philip answered.
“I shouldn’t say things?”
“You should always say things. That’s why I like you so much.”
Philip kept his arm hooked in mine, any urge for an early exit collapsing as fast as it was constructed. Back at the hotel, Philip squeezed my shoulder then walked to the shining bank of elevators.
But the next morning, his sourness returned.
“I thought you were buying other clothes,” Philip said.
“I couldn’t find any,” I said, though I hadn’t looked.
People streamed in and out of the lobby.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I don’t know where to look,” I said, my words close enough to the truth to hold water. This tendency to lean on almost truths still lives in me, though decades later I’m better able to resist it, to understand the holes I’m digging, the bullshit I’m trying to pass off as a clean bill of sale, even to myself.
I wanted Philip to say he’d take me to a store with personal shoppers, music thrumming so each outfit I tried on felt part of a montage. But he answered, “You should look harder,” and told me about a lunch he’d need to be driven to at the house of someone who was once royalty, who would be royalty still had the tides of history washed up on a more dictatorial shore.
While Philip went to his room to make phone calls, I asked the concierge about clothing stores. I told him how my boss didn’t like my wardrobe, inventing insults Philip hadn’t said about it. The concierge kept his eyes on the list he was writing for me.
At the first store he’d suggested, mannequins in all black and clothes in precise piles, I spent too much on pants and button-downs, more on a scarf and small rectangular sunglasses, then black boots that made my feet ache. After I’d paid, I walked past a rack of belts and dropped one into my bag. But an alarm went off as I walked out. I felt dumb and done for, though I mimicked Philip’s impatience and said, “I forgot to pay for this.” The clerk rang up the belt without looking at me.
The next day, waiting for the elevator after running errands, I found Pavel there, too, armed with his usual blank expression. My heart was a thumping tail.
“I thought you were in New York,” I said.
“Collectors of great importance I need to meet,” he answered, his impression of Philip correct and unkind.
With his shorn hair and pale skin, Pavel looked almost infirm. Still, there was a beauty to him I wanted to lay claim to, odd features that came together in strange harmony. A bag of face creams crinkled between my fingers.
“I’m starving,” Pavel said.
“You should eat.”
“Meet me back here in a half an hour. I’ll take you to lunch.”
“I could eat some lunch,” I said, trying to mask the electric thrill of his invitation.
At an internet café that afternoon, I read an email from June telling me she’d heard my message and appreciated my prayers (I hadn’t offered any). There was also an email from my mom. It seems that you called, it began. She went on about her job answering phones and tidying locker rooms, about the relief she’d felt since leaving her fiancé George. She ended her message with this: Are you really in Europe, or is this one of your jokes? I started to write back, but didn’t feel like it. Thought to write to June, too, but was frustrated by her mention of prayers I hadn’t offered. I opened an email from Janice instead. Sugar, it began. M. and I decided to take a break from work and drive cross country. We’ll be gone for a month or two. She added that she had left rent checks, asked that I water her plant. Instead of writing back that I wanted to quit my job and join them, I told her about lunch with Pavel in a place with pale floors and striped wallpaper, the two of us eating a fish I’d never heard of.
I was about to log out, when a new message appeared from the email address truebeliever31. There’s a computer here I can use, my dad began. He wrote about the rehab center where he was staying, the walks they made him take, and the device they had him breathe into to measure his strength. I hear you have a fancy job and are traveling, he continued. I always knew you would do bigger things. Even when you were young the world we lived in was small for you. I admire that about you Gordon. The way you push. There was none of June’s veiled disappointment. No sense he expected me there while I was tangled up with the wider world. Even his blessing at the email’s end didn’t bother me. I wanted to write back that I’d forgiven him, though he hadn’t asked for any. Instead I wrote that it was so good to hear from him, that as I read his message, I could hear his voice saying those words. I hope June told you about the messages I’ve been leaving. How I’ve been thinking about you.
Driving Philip to a dinner that night, he asked what I’d done with my day.
“Pavel’s here,” I said.
He was quiet for several minutes. Then, as if we’d been in one continuous conversation, Philip talked about the two collectors who’d bought Pavel’s work in as many days.
“He might just be a star,” he said.
“A reluctant one,” I answered.
“That’s just a performance.”
“Seems genuine to me.”
“That’s what makes it so compelling.”
Philip cracked open his window, and cool air barreled in. I wondered if he noticed the new clothes I had on.
Just before we turned into the driveway of the place he was having dinner—he’d called it a house, though it seemed more in palace territory to me—Philip asked me to stop the car. He got out and moved to the back seat.
“Keeping up appearances,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
As I looked down the pin-straight driveway, trees on either side made more regal with lighting, Dad’s words about my larger destiny soured on my tongue.
“Of course I don’t mind,” I said, though I pictured the clenched thrill of saying the opposite just to see how he’d answer.
Later that night, Pavel called my room. “I’m at the hotel bar and think you should come.”
“A long way down,” I said.
“Come soon,” he told me, and hung up.
I changed into a shirt I’d recently bought, the most I’d ever spent on a single item of clothes. It was black and carried the slightest shimmer. “He’s probably just bored,” I mumbled, though those words skidded across the surface rather than sinking in.
The hotel’s bar was walled in dark wood, with assertive, muscular moldings, the music that played whispery and clean. I sat down next to Pavel and ordered a beer.
“My treat,” he said. “In case there’s something else you want. Tobi here makes fantastic cocktails.”
“I didn’t order a beer because I’m poor,” I said.
“I wasn’t suggesting.” The ice cubes in his drink glittered. His pale eyes stayed on me.
“I might want to paint you,” Pavel said.
An older couple sat at the bar’s far end, her hair shiny and round, his tie so tight it appeared to be choking him.
“You weren’t at dinner tonight,” Pavel said.
“Was waiting outside though. The things we do for love.”
“I find it hard to tell when you’re joking.”
“I usually am.”
I looked back at him as if in a childhood staring contest, a game I’d loved for its mix of aggression and intimacy.
“I suppose I spend most of my time around serious people,” Pavel said.
“That’s your problem right there.”
I was thinking of ordering another beer when Pavel leaned close and said, “Walk me to my room.”
We got into the elevator. It pinged as we passed each floor. Pavel’s pale hands were crossed just above his groin, and breath filled his chest.
Once at his door, Pavel kissed me. His tongue pressed mine into submission, a suction to his kissing that was surprisingly, desperately hapless. I moved my hand down his back, felt its collection of thin, taut muscles. Just as my fingers found his belt, Pavel stopped them. He closed his mouth, kissed me a final time, and said good night.
“There’s a word for this,” I said.
“You mean teasing? That isn’t what I’m trying to do,” he answered. “But I’ll see you in the morning.”
I went downstairs. The concierge from before stood at his post.
“You clean up well, I think is the expression,” he said, with sibilant precision.
“I do,” I said. He looked surprised at my frank confidence. “But I have a question. Where are places to go for people like us?”
“You are meaning?” he asked.
“For fun,” I said.
He nodded as if we were in the midst of a more professional conversation, then whispered, “If you wait a block away, in front of the bank, in half an hour. I am done then and can take you somewhere.”
I wasn’t particularly interested in the concierge. But I needed to move beyond the ache of Pavel dangling his attention in front of me only to yank it away, so I said, “At the bank, great.” A man I assumed was his manager walked past, and the concierge handed me a brochure about a castle turned museum, saying in a loud, community theater tone, “This should answer all your questions.”
The next night I went to pick up Philip after a dinner and found Pavel with him. They dropped into the back seat, Philip’s expression softened by booze.
“We should have a nightcap,” he said.
To turn right, Pavel tapped the back of my seat once, for left, twice. Munich’s storefronts glowed like museum dioramas.
Inside the bar dance music thrummed and men clustered close together and porn played on monitors. Though it wasn’t the place the concierge and I had gone to, it had the same overloud debauchery.
“What would you like?” I asked.
“Something with an umbrella in it,” Philip said.
“Wine has been had,” Pavel added.
“We sold more of Pavel’s work at dinner,” Philip said. “Best thousand dollars I ever spent.”
“Dinner cost a thousand dollars?” I asked.
“A little umbrella,” Philip said.
The bartender made him a pineapple-flavored drink. On a nearby monitor, a man swallowed an entire cock as if it were some small morsel.
I returned with drinks for them, a club soda for me. A man passed and eyed Pavel. Territoriality tightened my gut.
Philip took a sip of his drink. “What is this?”
“What you asked for,” I said.
A nearby group of men started to dance, and Philip cooed with appreciation. I’d only seen him giddy like this at his birthday. Even after several glasses of wine, Philip usually stayed stoic and clear. I wasn’t sure what had changed, but he seemed to be having fun, and Pavel touched my knee under the table. One of the dancing men tried to take Philip’s hand, but my boss shook his head. “Aber Gordon will mit dir tanzen,” he said, telling me to join in his place.
Philip stared at me, a reminder that I was on the clock, I supposed. On the monitor above us, the cock swallower was now being pummeled from behind. Philip’s brow ticked downward, water emptying from a tub. I didn’t want to be told to dance, though days before I’d considered sleeping with him had it come to that. But the possibility of sex had felt kind, an attempt at closeness, Philip telling me to dance a way for him to stand over me with his heels on my back. The man I was meant to dance with began to lose interest. But Philip’s remained. I wanted to meet his power play with refusal. But Pavel looked worried. And even before I gave in, I knew I would.
The dancing men invited me into their circle with polite indifference. I engaged in a minute of perfunctory grinding before I said, “Danke,” and sat back down. Philip looked overjoyed, perhaps because he’d pressed and I’d caved, maybe because it was fun to watch me dance. My meanness lost out to embarrassment, as it sometimes did. Philip had taken me to Europe after all. And I was at the receiving end of Pavel’s sharpening attention. So I sipped my club soda and crossed my legs and asked if I was allowed to smoke in this place.
Umbrella drink finished, Philip announced that he needed to sleep. We climbed into the car, the two of them in the back seat. Two blocks in came Philip’s soft snores.
“When you were watching me dance, were you thinking about painting me?” I asked.
“You’re not a bad dancer,” Pavel said.
We were stopped at a red light. Philip’s snores rose and fell.
“Should I meet you?” I asked. “After I drop him off, I mean.”
I wanted to spend the night with Pavel, for the sex, of course, but also his arms around me as we slept, eyes pinning me in place first thing in the morning.
“I think it’s sleep for me,” Pavel said.
Back at the hotel, Philip’s nap seemed to have sobered him up, so when I hit the elevator button for his floor and not mine, he answered, “I’m not as bad as all that” and kissed my cheek. His lips were damp plastic. In my room, I listened to the occasional click of doors.
As I lay there, riled up and let down, why I wanted Pavel coalesced: He was extraordinary. Men I’d dated before had been clever or cute, also earthbound. But being in his orbit felt like a drug both expensive and hard to find. I chided myself for thinking I could have him, afraid, too, that I was close to something I wanted a great deal, and might not get.
Sleep wouldn’t come. Each time it seemed close I’d think about Pavel saying, “It’s just sleep for me.”
I didn’t see him again for the rest of the trip.