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never forget. To know the taste with a certainty that could never be taken from you.
    In which case, if you were someone like me, you might berate yourself for having foolishly, hungrily desired the taste in the first place. You might, in the days and weeks following your first and only night with a woman named Claire Marvel—days and weeks during which the phone doesn’t ring and the mail delivers nothing but the usual crap and the ache around your heart that originally felt like a premonition is gradually solidifying into a steel-lined bomb shelter—you might just conclude that you’d made a terrible mistake. Might grow desperately angry. Might try to forget, get back to square one, to the impossible zero (discounting, of course, Zeno’s Paradox), where for more than twenty-five years you’d been living peacefully, if not always happily, in studied oblivion of any tastes whatsoever.
    Before her.

    I threw myself into my work.
    My undergraduate teaching was finished for the year; all my attention turned to Professor Davis’ work in progress. Three hundred and seventy-five pages of undeniably lucid conservative ideology hammered out in a prose notable for its frequent use of the first-person singular, as well as its unshakable confidence in its own historical significance.
    I read it twice. On the first pass I wrote my comments on a legal pad accompanied by corresponding page numbers and bibliographical references. On the second I winnowed my queries down to ten and transferred them to yellow Post-it notes which I inserted into the manuscript. As I saw it at the time, my job was to appear politically savvy and intellectually scrupulous in Davis’ eyes without causing him either to doubt my loyalty or to balk at what he might perceive as impertinence. It seemed to me that a few critical notes would be more palatable to him than dozens. So, as agreed upon, I crafted my brief observations in such a way as to almost entirely suppress any evidence of my own feelings about the subject at hand.
    My work was well received.

    Summer. Clear, hot days, everyone down by the river—rowers and lovers, pedants and geriatrics, mothers with babies. Animals to the water hole and the whole human parade.
    In the long, slowly cooling evenings I sat with my landlady, Mary Watson, in the front garden of her rambling Brattle Street house. My apartment was on the second floor, with its own entrance. Occasionally Mary and I would pass an hour or so together at the end of the day, reading in companionable silence as her obese Blue Persian waddled mewling at our feet on a leash.
    “Misha’s just like a little dog,” she observed one fair evening in late June. Her voice was old New England, singsongy on the vowels. It wasn’t the first time she’d offered such an opinion.
    “Dogs can be trained,” I said.
    “Don’t be narrow-minded, Julian. Misha chooses to ignore us. It’s a sign of his independence and self-possession.”
    “Some of the world’s biggest despots are known for their independence and self-possession, Mary.”
    “Now you’re being ridiculous. Come here, Misha dear. Come to Mother.”
    Lurching forward, Misha threw himself against Mary’s purple stockings and began aggressively rubbing. His purring, amplified within his capacious belly, was deep and undulating in rhythm.
    “I’ve always found feline mating rituals fascinating,” I said.
    Mary sniffed. “Don’t be cruel. Misha’s testicles were removed ages ago. It was a trauma I’m sure he doesn’t wish to revisit.”
    I bowed my head. “Apologies to Misha.”
    “I will relay them.” She stroked the cat’s obscenely arched back. “See what a little dear he is? Gus, there you are. I was beginning to worry.”
    Gus Tolland, in his seventies, dressed in a sage-green high-waisted suit of a bygone era, emerged from the house carrying a tray with a martini shaker and two glasses. A widower himself, he’d been the best friend of Mary’s husband. They’d been