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rockers, and she treated me as if I were Wayne Coyne, an aging, second-tier celebrity whose second-tierness was exactly what made him hip. We met in what was nominally a strip club. Under a recent city ordinance, however, it had become illegal for women to show their nipples in public, so all the venue could offer was some sad girls in bras jogging dully in place on a platform behind the bar, ignored by everybody. “Do you know what the chicks who work in these places call them?” the photographer asked me. It’d been years since I’d heard anyone use the word “chicks.” “Stopless bars.”
    â€œNot tipless bars?”
    She laughed in my ear. “That’s good. I’m going to tell that to somebody.”
    We collected the female model, who was a friend of hers, and took taxis from one location to the next. At each stop, our protagonist would pose with a different partner, a waxy corporate mannequin, a bike messenger with a mane of tumbling black curls, a bouncy exotic dancer who kept snapping off
backbends. The night got hotter and more humid until, as we were hauling our gear between locations, the sky burst with a biblical roar, and we were pummeled with what might have been lead shot. For the rest of the night, we did our work to the drumming of falling water. We went from the photographer’s apartment building to a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side and back to her apartment. By then it was early morning, and we were all exhausted. The model could barely prop herself up on some pillows to fondle the exotic dancer. When the photographer told her she could get dressed, she let out a groan of relief and called her boyfriend to come pick her up. I stayed behind to help with the lights. Outside it was still raining. “You’re never going to get a taxi,” the photographer told me. We looked at each other. Her eyes were blue but looked black because of her makeup. I don’t remember whether F. was down in the city that night. She may have been traveling. Regardless of where she was, she’d put no pressure on me to come home and would be unlikely to question me too closely even if I were to walk in while the neighborhood parents were seeing their kids off to preschool in the street below. This reticence is one of her most attractive features, and also one of her most unnerving. In somebody else, it might indicate a fear of learning something unpleasant, but I think F.’s reticence has more to do with her sense of dignity, her fear of debasing yours or sacrificing her own. In either case, I wouldn’t have to lie.
    Still, I left. I could say that I was thinking of the vows I was supposed to recite in another few months or that between the photographer and F. there was no choice. But, really, who was asking me to make a choice? (The allure of infidelity—one of
the allures—is the allure of not choosing. You can have both.) It may be more correct to say that I had too vivid a picture of how I’d feel on waking up next to the photographer, how anxious I’d be to get away, and how anxious I’d be not to seem too eager about it, which would—I knew this from earlier occasions, before I met F.—make me stay later and later, until she’d either gotten the wrong impression or was good and sick of me. It may be that much of my loyalty to F. arises from my sense that she is the only person I wouldn’t, to one extent or another, want to get away from when I woke beside her in the morning, not because she’s the person I’m sanctioned to wake beside but because of all the people I might wake or have woken up beside, she is the only one with whom I can feel alone, as in the Frank O’Hara poem that ends, “You are emptying the world so we can be alone.”
    It may also be that I realized that the photographer wasn’t sending me sexual signals so much as observing professional etiquette. Feature reporters have to