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“Anne, do you remember that night when we were at Sylvia’s and sketched each other?” Kate asked.

“Of course,” I said. I remembered it clearly. Sylvia had made a sketch of my face floating in a sea of black, my eyes closed,
as if I were dreaming. At one point, she had stared at me, and said, “I see now. You’re entirely in your head, aren’t you?”
I was a little taken aback and didn’t know whether to be pleased or wounded. It was a dissection as well as a caress, and
it was like this as we sketched, our hands moving over paper as we followed the hills and shadows of each other’s faces.

“I still have some of our sketches pinned on my wall,” Kate said. “It makes me think it isn’t hopeless after all, that at
least somewhere in the world people see me as I want to be seen.” She began to cry because no matter how many gypsy women
tell her to act with her head, Kate will always wear her heart on her sleeve. I took her wrist and shook it gently.

Vincent always seemed so contemplative, sitting on my porch in the early morning, smoking his first cigarette of the day and
drinking black coffee. He held the cigarette slanted between his fingers, his right hand resting on his lap, and I liked to
watch him flick off the ash and bring the cigarette to his lips. Where we lived in upstate New York, it was winter six months
of the year and there was snow on the ground until April. We sat on the porch wearing our winter coats, mugs of steaming coffee
resting on our armchairs, our breath turning into vapor. Vincent had a perfect memory and recited verses to me:

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring

Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers

Comes autumn with his apples scattering;

Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

It seemed as if the snow would never melt under a sky so white, and when I walked along the salted streets in town, warm air
unfurling from my mouth, I felt the hopelessness of the season, as if I were suspended in a dream.

Vincent thought I was an innocent. He said he could tell just by looking at me. Sometimes, though, when he drank himself into
a stupor and I held his arm to keep him from falling on the sidewalk, I thought he was the naive one. Of course, his vulnerability
appealed to me. When we made love, he sometimes left bruises on my breasts, and afterward, I felt oddly pleased looking at
myself in the mirror. For once in my life, I didn’t recognize myself, and I was sorry when the colors faded and there was
nothing but blank skin as before.

I had been hired to teach English for a year at an elite boarding school in the Adirondacks. The closest city was two hours
away, and many of the young single teachers usually wound up at the local inn on Friday night for drinks. This is how I met
Vincent. He came up to our table with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a martini, looking very dapper in his light
brown suit and gold tie. I would later discover that he was popular with his students, who liked to call him Gatsby. Vincent
had a loose grin on his face, and I envied him immediately. He seemed more at ease than any of us in that room. He sat down
next to me, and I found out that he taught Philosophy.

“So who do you prefer? Plato or Nietzsche?” I asked him.

“I like both, actually. I’m amphibian in that way.”

Caitlin, a teacher who, like me, had just moved here several weeks before, was asking everyone at the table what there was
to do in this town. She had already tried the two pizza places and the execrable Chinese restaurant, and during her first
week in town she had broken down and gone to the movie theater and watched an inane film about sexually attractive clones.
“But the really creepy thing was that slide show before the movie started,” she said, and everyone else at the table burst
out laughing. “You haven’t seen it?” she asked me. “Before the movie starts, they project all these happy snapshots of people
in town. I’d been here only a few days, remember, but I recognized half the people smiling in the photographs. It was terrifying.”

“Well, I don’t know if this will interest you, Caitlin,” Vincent said, “but Richard Goode will be performing in the chapel
next month.”

“Who is Richard Goode?” she asked.

“He’s a pianist. One of the best.”

The conversation drifted, and I turned to Vincent and asked if he played the piano.

“Only left-hand pieces,” he said. I thought at first he was being whimsical until I glanced down at his hands. His right hand
rested in his lap, the index finger pointing stiffly out and the other fingers curled painfully under. “Oh, that one isn’t
worth looking at,” he said, and he put it back into his pocket. “Now, I do like my left hand. I think it’s my best feature.”
He showed it to me. It was a fine hand, the hand of a pianist, with long, sensitive fingers and short, broad nails.

“A beautiful hand,” I agreed.

“Why, thank you,” he said, studying it in a fond, careless way. Then he looked down at his glass, which was empty except for
an olive dangling on a toothpick. The waitress came by and asked if he wanted another martini.

“Please.”

“Bombay Sapphire, right?”

“With three olives.”

His hazel eyes, with their flecks of gold, were bemused yet curiously inert. I should have stood up then and wished him good
night. He probably had no other thought than to retreat further into his haze, and I knew it was foolish to follow a person
in search of his own pleasure.

He gazed at me for a moment as if I reminded him of someone. “There is a needle poking me in this chair,” he said gravely.

“There is? Where?”

He took my hand and guided it to the spot. Beneath the blue fabric, I felt something sharp against my finger. He let go of
my wrist and smiled at me. Later he would confess that he had pointed out the needle in order to touch my hand.

He invited me to his place to play the piano, and as we walked to his apartment, I felt exactly as I did when I was a child
and had to perform in front of a group of strangers. My hands were icy cold, and my chest felt tight and hollow. During my
last piano recital, when I was thirteen years old, I had frozen in the middle of a piece, unable to remember what came next.
There was a terrible breathless silence in the audience as I stared at my hands resting lightly on the keys, and I felt far
away but also at the very center of things, as if I were attending my own funeral. I started the piece over from the very
beginning, but this time an automaton was playing. Everyone clapped in relief when I finished. I stood up and looked out over
the audience and saw my piano teacher covering her face with her hands. She had known me since I was six years old, and at
the beginning of my first lesson she had made me take off every single one of the bright tinsel rings I had worn for her.

Vincent lived above a florist shop in a redbrick walk-up. His apartment was elegant in an impersonal way, as though he were
a boarder living in already furnished rooms. I would find out later that his antique cherry furniture had been handed down
to him from an aunt in Charleston, its genteel character sullied by piles of paper, coffee mugs, empty beer bottles, and saucers
turned into ashtrays. Above the mantelpiece, he had hung his diplomas, and most of his books were depressing leather-bound
editions with gold lettering on the spines, glossy little caskets I would hesitate before opening. In the dim light, his piano
crouched like a dark, sleek animal in the corner.

I sank into an orange parlor chair and listened to him play a waltz by Brahms. My sister and I had played the same piece as
a duet, but we had played it as if a relentless metronome were ticking inside our heads. Vincent played the piece with leisurely
grace, a spaciousness between the notes which suggested a longing for something else. He followed the Brahms with a more difficult
piece by Scriabin, and though he played well I noticed gaps in the music where his one hand could not accomplish the work
of two. The music was more poignant to me for this reason, but I knew it would offend him if I ever said so.

“Don’t you want to play?” he asked when he had finished.

“I’m not very good.”

“Does that matter?”

“I get more pleasure listening to you play.”

He smiled at my cowardice. When I wrapped my arms tight around myself, he asked if I was cold.

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

“Are you sure?” He got up and closed the window. “Why don’t we play something together?”

I sat beside him on the bench, and Vincent suggested we try the Gladiolus Rag. I thought it would be easier to play the part
for the left hand, but I kept hitting the wrong notes. Vincent played the melody with beautiful ease, and I felt bad that
he had to suffer me as his duet partner. Finally, I gave up and took my hand off the keyboard. “It’s too painful to listen,”
I said.

“You are very hard on yourself, aren’t you?” he asked, and he began to kiss me gently around my lips, small chaste kisses
that surprised me. For some reason he made me think of a giraffe the way he kissed me with his mouth closed. His innocent
grazing was oddly touching. We kissed some more, and I asked if we could move to his bedroom.

“Are you sure?” Vincent asked. “You want to go so fast?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

He looked hurt by this answer.

“I mean I don’t care if we rush things,” I said, and he gave me a lopsided grin.

I stayed over at Vincent’s that night. At about two in the morning, I woke up to hear him talking in his sleep. The room was
shrouded in darkness, and I thought at first the voice was emanating from a corner of my mind. I struggled to remember where
I was beside this dreaming shape who spoke so reasonably about blue caviar and the hinterland. The more lucid I was, the less
I understood. Vincent’s words fell upon my ears like music, then dropped into oblivion. A part of me was tempted to get up
and write down everything he said, to discover his secret thoughts, the desires he hid even from himself. Who doesn’t wish
to know the very heart of a person? But I was too lazy to stir from bed and preferred to drowse in the warm dark beside him.
I tried to commit the stream of words to memory before falling asleep, but in the morning his sentences had disappeared along
with my dreams.

In early November, after the first snow had fallen, we went to hear Richard Goode perform in the chapel. Vincent suggested
that we sit on the side balcony, where we could have a view of the pianist’s hands. He was appalled by the empty pews. In
the city, Richard Goode’s concerts sold out regularly, but here in the village bounded by mountains and snow, hardly anyone
had come. I didn’t mind the half-empty chapel. It seemed more intimate, and as Goode played a Beethoven sonata, I looked out
over the audience, my attention drawn toward the high windows, the music filling the empty space of the chapel. I listened,
and it sounded as if the heart were asking for something in a delicate way, making little excursions, taking desultory paths
around the question, but what it wanted was something so small and particular, and always it kept returning to the same note,
bittersweet and piercing. I could hear Vincent breathing as he sat close to me, our legs barely touching, and when he leaned
forward with bowed head, I wanted to kiss the nape of his neck.

I remembered how as a young girl I had restlessly wandered the woods behind my house. I had read books—Lucy opening the wardrobe,
Alice falling through a rabbit hole—and felt the ordinariness of my life. Branches swayed, lifting and dropping tremendously,
and I made myself dizzy looking up at them. I waited, but another world did not open. I grew older. I moved to different cities.
I read and dreamed and looked out of windows. My hands and feet were always cold. I began to feel like a brittle doll sitting
upright in a tiny chair. I wanted to be picked up and thrown out the window or smashed against a wall. If I were shattered
and put back together again, I would be able to look any person fully in the eye.

When we first started seeing each other, Vincent asked me a lot of embarrassing questions. He wanted to know about all the
odd places where I’d had sex and then volunteered some stories of his own. One involved a dinner party. Between the main course
and dessert, he and his date had separately excused themselves from the table and then met up in their host’s bedroom. “It
was rude of us,” he admitted. “Everyone knew what was going on.” He then asked me if I’d ever done anything like that, and
I told him I hadn’t.

He also asked me what I liked in bed. When he saw me hesitate, he said, “It’s true that you have to be careful revealing your
fantasies to someone. When you each know what pleases the other, then sooner or later it begins to feel scripted.” He was
finally able to get it out of me that I wanted him to be forceful. “I like the idea of someone feeling strong desire for me,”
I said. “I want to feel overwhelmed.”

“A rape fantasy,” he said.

“Hmm. I guess you could call it that.”

As for Vincent, he liked women’s calves. He had purchased videos of women in short airy dresses and high heels walking slowly
up stairs or stepping down the street and turning around with care.

When we had sex now, Vincent was rougher with me. “I wasn’t sure I’d like it, but I’m really getting into this,” he told me.
He pulled my hair and bit my cheeks and put his hand over my mouth as if he were trying to suffocate me. Sometimes it felt
silly. And sometimes I bit and bruised him in return. A few times Vincent went too far, and I felt myself shrinking away from
him. All the while, I felt we were getting closer.

He once asked me why I was attracted to him. And I told him it was because he did things I’d never do. It was easy for him
to cross boundaries, whereas I could never be so reckless. He reflected for a moment, then said, “You say this, but really
I’m just a tweedy, bookish person who teaches high school kids.”

Going to Amsterdam over spring break was Vincent’s idea. He had been there twice already. The first time he hooked up with
his friend Anton, which surprised him, as he’d never been with another man. The second time he brought Lisa, the violinist
with the shapely calves who later broke his heart when she dropped him for an older man. When I asked, Vincent said the trip
with Lisa had been disappointing. She was too uptight. “A librarian type,” he said, smiling. “Just like you.”