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decade or so. Two: He’s taking Prozac, so he’s not really, you know …”
    “Interested in sex?”
    I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow. How did she know that?
    “Will was on it for a few months last year after he missed another big deadline. But then he realized that because of that particular side effect, he was better off
off
the medication.”
    “Unfortunately, I don’t think the same would be true for Malcolm.”
    “Doesn’t sound like it.”
    “And three,” I continued, and here was the clinker: “While he’s brilliant and funny and weird and interesting and confused about everything, of one thing he is absolutely certain: He does not want any more children, given what happened to the last one.”
    “I don’t even know where to begin,” she said finally.
    And neither did I, really.
    I ran my hands through my hair and tried to get a handle on how to explain him and our relationship—not just for Amy’s sake but for my own as well: Whenever I tried to deconstruct the complicated elements of our situation and examine the sum of its parts, it always left me confused and a little sad, as if I’d lost something I wasn’t sure I’d ever really had.
    “This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but despite the downside—the rather obvious, inescapable, problematic, and deeply ironic downside—we’re really good together, I think. We eat together. Sleep together. Spend weekends together. And since we don’t have sex, we talk all the time. So I mean, except for feeling like I’m dating Big Bird—a big, large, funny, weird, kind, strange, generous, sexless sort-of-boyfriend—”
    “Who’s walking down Sesame Street schlepping an awful lot of baggage—” she added.
    “I’ve actually never been in such a normal relationship.”
    “Or been so well rested.”
    “Or well fed.”
    Or unafraid
.

5

    Malcolm hadn’t always been frozen—just since he met me.
    Or so he says.
    Which is not as bad as it sounds, since he met me right about the time he started taking the libido-deadening anti-depressants and also around the time that his career took one last big nosedive plunge into has-been obscurity. But I suspect his intimacy problems began long before me, sometime after his son died and sometime after his marriage collapsed under the weight of all that grief.
    Which led to his drinking.
    Which led to his profound writer’s block.
    Which, as it turned out, led to me, when I took his night course at The New School on the history of print journalism last winter semester.
    And so we met.
    Ours was, by anyone’s standards, including my own, an unremarkable beginning: a question I asked one cold, cold night after the second class, which he answered; then a self-deprecatingremark I made about my job, to which he responded more directly than I’d expected.
    “So why do you do it?” he asked.
    “Because I don’t know what else to do.”
    He smiled ironically, and when he did, it made me feel as if he’d chosen me to share in some secret private joke. “I can understand that. And why else?”
    It was mid-February; bleak. I looked out the third-floor classroom window past our glassy reflections into the cold blackness beyond. “Because I can’t do anything else.”
    “I can understand that, too. Only in your case, it’s clearly not true.”
    “Why in my case?”
    “Because in your case, as opposed to mine, you’re young.”
    “I’m thirty-five. That’s not so young.”
    “Oh, yes it is. When you’re staring down the barrel at fifty, it’s very, very young.” He rubbed his face where his beard would have been if he’d had one—a face that, at most, could easily have passed for forty-two or forty-three—the skin lined only between the brows and around the mouth; his eyes deep brown surrounded by clear whites; his thick straight hair still dark, with only a few strands of gray here and there. “And obviously you’re quite capable, otherwise you wouldn’t have the job that you