My romantic life, not surprisingly, had never been particularly happy. I was stuck at the time in a relationship that should have ended long before. We had jumped each other one night the previous summer, and though we’d been together for over a year, we had little in common and had never much progressed beyond the sex. She was gorgeous, bisexual, impulsive, experienced, with a look that knew things and a laugh that didn’t give a damn. We would go to bed, and then we would go dancing, and then we would go to bed again.

But as for anything like real intimacy, I just couldn’t manage it. I’d had girlfriends before, including ones I’d even thought I’d loved, but things had always ended badly: fights, sulks, head games, tears. Eventually, good riddance. At least this time we didn’t fight. We didn’t talk, either—not about anything real, not about what was going on with us or what we might have been feeling. Instead, I’d hold forth as usual, even think I was doing her a favor in the process. I was a graduate student at Columbia, after all, and she had barely scraped through college. I was going to do something important with my life, and she was marking time as a waitress—a job that struck me as depressingly unambitious—while she tried to figure out her next move. In short, I didn’t respect her enough to imagine that she might have anything to say to me that was worth listening to.

I knew it wasn’t a real relationship, but I kept telling myself that this was what I’d always wanted. A steady supply of sex, with no strings attached: a teenage boy’s idea of paradise. Except I wasn’t a teenage boy anymore. Still, I thought—and this is how numb I was by then—well, so maybe I never will find that one person to love.