parties. It was easy to find men for sex, because she knew that men think about sex all the time, or every seven minutes, so they’re always ready for sex. She had read the seven-minute statistic in the Times science section some years back and wondered about it. Then she experimented with herself. She set a timer for seven minutes throughout five hours, when she was home, and, whatever she was doing, reading, eating, washing dishes, looking at the ceiling or out of the window, when the alarm went off, she thought about sex. Every seven minutes, she realized, was very frequent, and, if she were feeling sad, it was hard to think about sex, and also she realized she didn’t think about sex, maybe she didn’t know how, and she managed poorly or inadequately to concoct an image or something or someone to fantasize about. Every seven minutes was hard, she didn’t know how men did it, because she didn’t have that kind of imagination, and also she didn’t know for how long men thought about sex every seven minutes. And what did they think up? Their penis entering a woman’s vagina, if they were heterosexual, while she’s moaning, Fuck me, fuck me hard, and was it always the same? Her lack of sexual imagination was one of the reasons she liked going to the movies. There was usually sex in the movies she saw, sometimes lots of it, if it was unrated or X-rated, and sometimes there was soft-core porn-like sex in movies, in so-called love scenes, which activated her dormant, lackluster, or empty fantasy life, but then she often became infatuated with the lead actor and, for a while, she pictured having sex with him. Many of the men she wanted to have sex with were actors, especially those who were good lovers in movies and sometimes on TV. They appeared to be good at sex, although that was hard to define, she didn’t know if it was similar to being good at tennis or some other activity; anyway, to her, inexactly, it was the way they held a female actor, the way they looked into her eyes, the kind of passion they exuded, and, manufactured or not, the sex or passion seemed real to her. She hoped they were really good at sex and not just acting, although actual people do act when having sex, too, though why they do and for what purpose, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t only faking orgasms, which women were said to do to make men feel better or just to get them to stop, since they really weren’t having any pleasure anyway. Men acted during sex, too, she knew several, some were worse actors than others. But the men she wanted to have sex with, the actual actors, were not available to her, they were in Hollywood, or London, or they were sometimes on the streets of New York City, like Sean Connery, but he was old when she saw him, and Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos , but she had never wanted to have sex with him, he was weaselly, even if she felt sorry for him in his part, and Al Pacino, she’d seen him in an Italian restaurant where he walked around in dark glasses as if he didn’t want anyone looking at him but made such a show of it everyone recognized him, though no one said hello or anything to him, because few do that in New York, mostly people don’t. But none of these actors she had seen in person appealed to her. She wanted to have sex with Daniel Day-Lewis, but only as he was when he played an American Indian/Caucasian in The Last of the Mohicans , not in any of his other roles, he was never again a barechested, mostly silent Indian, and now he didn’t want to act, she heard, and was a shoemaker, and then for a while she wanted sex with David Caruso, when he was on TV in NYPD Blue , because he could do tenderness and seemed gentle and also lusty, but then he quit the show, and she heard he was the opposite of that role, an egomaniacal asshole, and she did not want to have sex with George Clooney, Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, Ralph Fiennes, countless others, even McDreamy in Grey’s Anatomy , because everyone wanted him,