At the time, what I wondered most about this little speech was whether Phaedra herself believed it. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t even believe she was a virgin, for that matter. I had long felt that the species was either mythological or extinct, and that a virgin was a seven-year-old girl who could run faster than her brother.

So all the way home I was certain I knew how we would celebrate the coming of spring. I would convert my couch into a bed, and I would take this fine, sweet, magnificent girl in my arms, and, well, write in your own purple passage.

The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes aren’t. Phaedra certainly wasn’t. At my apartment I was shocked to discover that she really meant just what she had said. She was a virgin, and she intended to remain a virgin for the foreseeable future, and while she would willingly sleep with me with the understanding that we would do no more than share bed space in a platonic fashion, she would not countenance any sort of sexual involvement.

So I made the couch into a bed, all right, and I put her to sleep in it, and then I went into the kitchen and made myself some coffee and read several books without being able to pay much attention to them. A mood, I told myself. Or a monthly plague, or something. It would pass.

But it never did. Phaedra stayed at my apartment for just about a month, and it was as acutely frustrating a month as I have ever spent in my life. She was in every other respect a perfect house guest: absorbing company when I wanted company, perfectly unobstrusive when I had something to do, an ideal companion for Minna, a reasonable cook and housekeeper. If the delight that was Phaedra had been purely sexual, I would have quickly sent her away. If, on the other hand, I had not found her so overpoweringly attractive, I could have quickly adjusted to the sort of brother-sister relationship she wanted to maintain. Unless one possesses the mentality of a rapist, after all, one regards desire as an essentially mutual thing. Lust cannot long be a one-way street.