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student?”
    Styudent. “I am. What about you?”
    Again she laughed. I found her lightheartedness irresistible, after all the sheer emotion of the past few weeks with Alison. So little was at stake for once. “No, I’m not.”
    She had a crowded flat that she shared with two other girls. “It’s ever so messy,” she said, “but then they’re still at the Turtle, so it’ll be quiet. Here, come on, this is my room.”
    We fell onto the bed. It was cluttered with clothes and magazines and makeup, the usual magic of a girl’s room. She pushed them to the floor. There was the scent of her perfume in her hair as we kissed, and her breasts, which I could see the tops of in her scooped T-shirt, full and pinkish, looked beautiful. I put a hand to them.
    “Mm,” she said and unloosed her bra.
    I hadn’t realized how much I missed first hookups: when the awkwardness is pooled between you, something to laugh about together, that high school feeling of excitement and apprehension before routine and comfort set in. She pulled off my shirt and then hers and we kissed like that, both still in jeans and shoes, our naked chests together, giving each other goosebumps, nipples hardening as they brushed skin, all of it warm, all of it soft.
    “Did you roofie me?” I asked after a while.
    She laughed and pushed me onto the bed. “You’re cheeky.” Then she straddled me, kissing my neck and my lips, her back arched so she was pressed into my hard-on. She started to undo the buttons of my jeans. “Let me have it,” she said.
    I stopped her hand and said, “I have a girlfriend.”
    “In the States?”
    “Yeah. Is that a problem?”
    She covered her breasts with her arm. “It’s a pity.”
    “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
    She was silent for a moment, then lay down beside me, one arm over my chest. “It’s all right. I had fun.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Maybe find me on Facebook, in case things change. I like you.”
    “What’s Facebook?” I said. It was 2005.
    She laughed. “Look it up and find me. It’s Jessica Marten.”
    I took my shirt from the floor, and we kissed again for a time, standing up. She let her arm drop and pressed up against me.
    “Oh, well,” she said, her breasts softening into my ribs. “This is nice, at least.” Soon, though, there were voices in the hall, her roommates returning, and she gave me a last kiss and pushed me out through a side door, saying good-bye.
    So I left. I hadn’t noticed it as we came in, but in the courtyard of her building there had been a party. Half-deflated balloons had blown into piles; there were overflowing garbage cans. There were also six or seven abandoned beers, standing on a ledge, chilled by the night air. I took two. I put one in my pocket and opened the other. I held on to the last moments that I could ignore what I had done.
    Out on the street it felt suddenly not cool but cold, and the first violet paleness of dawn was emerging imperceptibly from the black of the middle night. It must have been four.
    Suddenly, after just a few steps, I had a terrible sense of what I would find at home—that there would be e-mails from Alison, apologizing that she hadn’t been able to write back sooner, she had been away from her computer, the congressman had been in Staten Island all day and she had been with him, she was sorry, too, the fight was stupid and ridiculous, we were fine, it was only one year. What had I done? Two days away from America, and this had happened. It seemed so shamefully short a time. It told its own story. I thought of Motherwell, when asked how long it took him to paint one of the Elegies, saying, “Thirty seconds and a lifetime.”
    As I walked down Jess’s street I saw a pretty blue mailbox that said MARK AND JUNE LENOX on it, the names curlicued with small white painted lilies, faded now, a woman’s touch, ten years old, from when they had moved in, and I felt a foreshadowing of the violent regret I knew was coming. I felt