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where to go. We avoided talking about money, but I couldn’t help noting Livy’s champagne tastes in couture and dining. But I figured that if she was covered, then so was I. Everything I have is yours, she said.
    Winter was the coldest on record. The Arctic winds that blew in were vicious and bitter. Day after day shrouds of snow fell over the world, blotting out the sky. The stuff accumulated in huge, swirling mounds that choked the boulevards and backstreets. A crusty frost adhered to everything in creation, from the sidewalks to the telephone wires to the windows of homes and shops. Going out of doors at all became an excruciatingly painful chore—like trudging through Siberia. Livy and I spent more time than ever holed up and between the sheets. We were slowly drifting, like twin feathers in a vacuum, into some separate existence all our own, where we only needed each other for sustenance. Of course, neither of us recognized, or cared, that it was happening. That’s what a certain kind of love can do….
    Coincidentally, circumstances conspired to facilitate our metamorphosis. Livy complained that she was growing bored with her classes and was thinking about dropping out of her program altogether. Weren’t all the great ones autodidacts anyway? Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Miller, Kerouac—they’d all gone running from the halls of academia! The worst fate would be to end up a Joyce Carol Oates, ensconced in a cushy ivory tower, scribbling page after page full of desiccated words that had no relation whatsoever to anything organic, anything living. So more and more often Livy cut her classes. She called in sick to thePurple Turtle whenever the whim ambushed her. As for me, I lay around doing nothing but waiting for her….
    All the dead time on our hands meant even more fucking. When a man has nothing constructive to do, he immerses himself in sex; Livy and I went on inventing endless variations on the theme. The boudoir filled with lotions, perfumes, jellies, aphrodisiacs—it became a veritable harlot’s chamber. One day she came home with a floor-to-ceiling mirror so that we could watch ourselves in the act. I became hypnotized with the sensual poses we struck, many of which recalled the mythological statuary of the Hindus. My favorite was Livy astride the bed, heels high on the stems of her Candies, while I scuttled from behind….
    Late one January afternoon…. Everybody else in the world except for us was at his job. The building was so still we could hear the merciless wind soughing at the window sealings. Livy happened to be on all fours on the mattress at the time, like a dog, with me slamming into her from behind—another favorite position. She was screaming with ecstasy when a soft tap sounded at the door.
    That knock stopped us dead, since whoever it was could no doubt hear us. We held our breath, thinking that maybe we were mistaken, that we’d only been jostling the bed frame against the wall.
    Then we heard it again.
    Livy slipped off the bed and tiptoed to the door. I followed, and watched as she put her eye to the peephole.
    She jerked back, like she’d been punched in the face. “It’s my father.”
    She laid her forefinger over her lips. We turned and retraced our steps, lifting our naked legs high, like people slogging through quicksand.
    We sat on the bed and waited. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered after the slow, heavy footsteps died away down the stairs to the street.
    It wasn’t that I was ashamed or embarrassed over what the guy had just heard. It was just so goddamned creepy to realize that somebody had been eavesdropping on your intimate grunts. You had to wonder how the porn actors did it.
    We tried to go back to screwing, but the mood was broken. I pushed a cigarette between my lips, leaned against the pillows, and stroked Livy’s still-wet pussy.
    “Your old man ever pull a stunt like that before?”
    She was oddly detached. She shrugged. The steel curtain had descended