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as she was speaking, began caressing my thigh, under the blanket, slowly, it was a clean gesture, not exactly a caress, but a sort of unconscious gesture, intended to keep something going, between a before and an after. It was hard to tell if there was some trick, but anyway she was touching me, and I was pleased with her. In fact they will be virgins when they get married, our girlfriends, but that doesn’t mean they’re afraid: they’re not. She was caressing me, and Andre was there. Every so often, but I couldn’t tell if it was by chance, she touched my sex, trapped in my underpants. As she did she went on talking about cloth and seams, without even changing her tone of voice, nothing. Whatever she had in mind,the means was perfect. She touched my hard sex, without turning a hair. I thought how I really had to tell Bobby about this, I couldn’t wait to tell him. I was thinking of the words to use when Andre got up: she said that she had to go now and as for the cloth she would ask at the theater, for the lights she would think of something. It seemed they had resolved it, the telephone rang, it was there on the table, my girlfriend answered, it was her mother. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, then put a hand over the receiver and said My mother… Andre whispered to her to go ahead, not to worry, she was leaving. They said goodbye and my girlfriend nodded at me—she wanted me to go with Andre and close the door. I pushed the blanket away, got up from the sofa, and followed Andre out, along the hall. Reaching the door, she stopped and turned, waiting for me. I took a few more steps: I had never been so close to Andre in my life, and I had never been alone with her, in a space where the two of us were alone. It was even less space than it was, because I was in my underpants, and in underpants my sex can be seen a mile away. She smiled at me, opened the door, and started to go out. But then she turned, and I saw an expression that until an instant before hadn’t been there—those wide-open eyes.
    The first sentence that Andre ever said to me was Sorry, but do you have any money?
    Yes, some.
    Could I borrow it?
    I went back to look in the pocket of my jeans. Mygirlfriend was still on the phone, I nodded at her to say that everything was OK. I got the money, it wasn’t much.
    It’s not much, I said to Andre, as I held out fifteen thousand lire, in front of the open door, where the fluorescent light of the landing mingled with the warm light of the entrance. Often on our landings there are thorny plants that never see the sun but nevertheless live, and they’re kept there for two purposes. The first is to make the landing itself seem refined. The second is to bear witness to a very particular stubbornness with regard to life, a silent heroism from which we are to learn something every time we leave the house. No one ever waters them, apparently.
    You’re nice, Andre said to me. I’ll pay you back.
    She grazed my cheek with a kiss. To do it she had to get a little closer, and her purse pressed against my underpants, it was just at that level.
    Then she left. As if now she had a kind of fever.
    As soon as I saw Bobby I told him all about it, slightly exaggerating the business of the touching under the blanket—it ended up that she had actually given me a hand job. He said then that they had surely planned it, it was all set up, one of those games that Andre played, it was incredible that my girlfriend had gone along, you shouldn’t underestimate that girl, he said. I knew it hadn’t been quite like that, but this did not keep me from going around for a while like someone who had a girlfriend capable of thinking up such plots and carrying them out. It lasted a while, then it passed. But during that time Iwas different with her—and she was different with me. Until, at a certain point, we got scared—and everything went back to normal.
    That’s how