She was the daughter of a British diplomat and she lived in a huge, failing stone mansion. I cannot tell you how much that impressed me. She had an accent so delicate that each word she spoke seemed to unfurl from her mouth like a flower, like a fragrance. Oh, how I was crazy for her, how I ached for her lips, but she preferred the bad boys. She liked them wicked and unpredictable. Boys who were born under punches, boys that didn’t ask questions and liked to fuck. I played tennis and coached T-ball.

I remember having my arm around her once when we were returning from a cottage. She was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. It was autumn and the lake we were driving by was so beautiful, the leaves an astonishment reflecting off the water, like a choral reef turned into light.

And Louis Armstrong, the forever of Louis Armstrong, was playing in the car, as if narrating, and I had my arm around Rebecca Harris who was so wonderfully asleep and safe and nestled into me, and it was a perfect moment that I wanted to sustain for eternity. Yes. This was it. Yes. And then the car hit a bump and I bounced up and hit my head on the roof and Rebecca woke up, startled. For the rest of the drive home I kept my arm around her, but it was different now, all wrong. It was like my arm was pinned behind her back and neither one of us was comfortable, and the Louis Armstrong that was playing became the crappy, sanitized Louis Armstrong and the lake fell behind us as we entered into the junk land that ringed the city, passing hamburger joints and lonely, broken homes, places and things that weren’t quite where they wanted to be.