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funny and if I’d like to share it with the other children. This was what the entire world knew. Now I did too.
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    In the months before F. and I got married, I was unexpectedly haunted by thoughts of the women I would never have sex with. I thought about women I knew and women I walked past on the street or sat across from in the subway, women I glimpsed in movie lines, women who bumped me with their shopping carts in the narrow aisles of the discount gourmet. I’d turn, readying my most ferocious glare, but the moment I saw their eyes burning back at me, it was all I could do not to swoon onto the cheese counter. I was like the teenaged St. Augustine, blinded by “the mists of passion that steamed up,” as one translation puts it, “out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh.” But I was in my forties. I pined for women I eavesdropped on in restaurants. How guilty I felt for listening to them! Their fragmentary conversations were so hot. Even their toughness was flirtatious. Their flirting was like a punch in the mouth. “He says, $850, take it or leave it. I say I’ll leave it.” “Uh oh, you’re getting the oysters. Does that mean I’m in trouble?” It drove me crazy. F. could have said the same things, and I would barely have noticed. She’s not coy that way, and she wouldn’t ask if she was in trouble unless she’d gotten a letter from the IRS.

    In the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, the operative word, the word that lends it force, is “never.” The women I would never have sex with. Had any of those women been available to me—had I been available to them—I doubt I would have felt much of anything. I could have overheard them talking about their orgasms. Their charge was the charge of the forbidden. In an earlier time, I might have spoken of those women as forbidden fruit, in keeping with the tradition that links sexual transgression to the prototypical transgression of the first human beings. A difference is that in Genesis, the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not in itself arousing. God warns Adam against eating its fruit, and Adam doesn’t think about it; he’s too busy naming the animals. Not even slutty Eve would have conceived a yen for that fruit if not for the serpent telling her how delicious it was, and so rich in antioxidants. Only in the erotic sphere do prohibitions have the opposite effect, giving their objects the sheen and perfume of the most wonderful fruit that ever hung from a branch—not the hackneyed apple, which is so often woody or mushy and whose hard core gouges the palate, but the grape, as is written in the Zohar, or the fig, which when split open so resembles a woman’s sex. What you can’t have is what you want. Because I knew their outcome—because I knew they would have no outcome—my encounters—or, more accurately, my sightings—always had an elegiac quality. It may not have been that different from what the very ill and the very old feel as they do things for what they suspect will be the last time: the last time they walk through the park; the last time they sit beneath a chestnut tree and watch the sunlight streaming through its leaves; the last cup of
strong coffee; the last time someone they love combs their hair. What I felt for those women wasn’t just desire, which by itself may not be enough to make you sag against the cheese counter at the Fairway; it was mourning.
    During this time I got an assignment from a tony sex magazine to write a story about a woman who goes around the city looking for a zipless fuck. It was basically an occasion for a photographer to take pictures—I mean good pictures, suitable for National Geographic —of half-dressed models pretending to have sex in different semipublic locations. There was no real reason for me to be there. I just liked the leggy photographer. She specialized in