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when we made love for the first time.
    When I had to return to Rome at the end of the week, Lauren accompanied me, quite as if it had all been planned in advance. I had not invited her; I did not object to her coming. Her suitcase, as it turned out, was already checked at the station.
    Lauren and Kevin were immediately intrigued with each other, a development which I had anticipated. After a week’s absence from the cut, I was very busy, and Kevin, the producer, was relatively idle; he’d come over mainly for the trip. So it was natural that Lauren should spend more time with Kevin and less with me while I put in ten-and twelve-hour days on the flatbed, cutting a none-too-interesting program on the then New York art scene. Most nights Lauren returned to my room, occasionally not. I’m not sure exactly which day she and Kevin closed the triangle. At the time I thought I didn’t care.
    I was nearly seven years older than Lauren, so I had an edge on her in experience (though there’s always the theory that women of her kind know everything from the instant of their birth). My love life at that time centered on avoiding inconvenience; you may say that I was just a little jaded. Lauren was an enormous refreshment to me, but I was determined not to let her become any more than that. From the very beginning I knew it would be unwise to be in love with Lauren, and for a long time I believed that I was not.
    For all of these excellent reasons I was undisturbed, maybe even relieved, when Kevin took Lauren back to New York with him, leaving me to wrap the edit and also some other tricky business that was going forward under the table. So far as I was concerned, she was well out of my way. It’s also true that in those days I was closer to Kevin than I had ever been to any woman, or ever expected to be.
    And more than a decade later, it was still frustrated love for Kevin, not Lauren, that could spoil my sleep, at one point bouncing me all the way out of the couch before I could even locate myself, back in the old apartment in Brooklyn. Once I figured out where I was, I began to pace the floor of the front room, stopping at last before the three fist-shaped holes in the wallboard, which I had forbidden all my various subtenants to repair. Much as I have tried to pretend and indeed be otherwise, I treasure both my memory and its symbols, as an injured man may come to prize his wound.
    So much the better, I was thinking. A bad night now will give me a better chance to sleep on the plane.
    Memory is fully as chimerical as forgetfulness, deceptive as any other work of the imagination, or so I comfort myself by believing. Memory will never serve up an absolute truth, only further examples of the relative. Five, six years went by without a crisis. A chimera herself, Lauren drifted in and out of New York, in and out of my house and Kevin’s and the houses of others who are only bit players in the script my memory writes. During that long meanwhile, Kevin and I drifted a little apart, our friendship waning in the manner that passionate friendships between confirmed heterosexuals often do.
    I watched Lauren’s comings and goings with what I liked to think was benign and paternal amusement. Nevertheless, I organized my life in such a way that I was always free to receive her, when and wherever she might turn up, with her aura of a recurring dream. There came a day which I cannot date, though I remember the hour: late afternoon, near sunset. Lauren slept calmly and I had drawn the sheet up solicitously around her chin. I was going out to buy something for dinner, but for some reason at the door I turned back and looked at her. Perhaps it was some trick of the dying light, its kindness to her face, the dust motes dancing above her in the sunshafts that came through the blind. I love this woman, I said to myself, shaping the words silently with my tongue, with surprise and horror, too, for I knew already that I could never trust her.
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