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Yvette’s humiliations, the sadistic whimsy of the many degradations to which she subjected him and the undeniably sweet suffering inherent in each one.
    At last, towards dawn, he left the Madame’s establishment – tormented and pleasured to equal degree, physically sated and emotionally drained, but most of all, wretchedly disappointed.
    For the third time that evening, Nicholas trudged along Yonge Street, head lowered, oblivious to the sex shop windows full of leather toys, the sibilant whispers of hookers cooing from the darkening doorways. He’d visited every purveyor of erotica that he could think of, questioned anyone who’d talk to him, even tracked down the young hustler who’d originally told him where Myriam could be found.
    He got nothing but blank stares and, occasionally, bitter laughter, as though the mere fact that he searched for Myriam rendered him an object of pity and disdain.
    Now the hopelessness of it was settling over him. Of course someone like Myriam wouldn’t stay in one place. Or at least wouldn’t permit the
illusion
that she remained in one place, he thought, remembering how he had begun making love with Myriam in a hotel room and then found himself back in the basement room where he’d first seen her.
    She’s gone
, he thought despairingly.
I’ll never find her again. I’ll never experience that feeling again
.
    Which is worse, he wondered, to have an experience so life-changing that you’d spend the rest of your life longing for it, dreaming of it, trying fruitlessly to find it again, or never to have had the experience at all? The first seemed a prescription for wretchedness, yet the second seemed an unthinkable choice.
    I’m alive
, he thought.
I’m cured. The test results came back, and I’m fine. Why isn’t that enough? Why do I want more? Why can’t I give this up and go back to Beth
–
if she’ll have me, that is? I love her: why isn’t she enough
?
    He passed a hooker of indeterminate gender thunking along on platform heels, a gaudily costumed creature who licked its lips and swished its silken tongue at Nicholas. There was a flicker of interest on Nicholas’s part, but it was replaced almost immediately by discouragement. Since the session with Madame Yvette, almost a week ago, he’d bought the services of half a dozen professional purveyors of sex, including a buxom she-male with a python-like dick, a Vietnamese whore who claimed knowledge of secret Tantric rites, and a submissive who aroused in Nicholas such powerful aggression that he feared equally for her life and for his sanity.
    But nothing, in that smorgasbord of guilty pleasures and perverse games of mind and body, did he find anything that resembled even remotely what he’d felt with Myriam, so he shook his head at the lip-smacking whore and trudged on, headed toward Dundas Street.
    Since coming to Toronto, Nicholas had walked past St Benedict’s Cathedral dozens of times without giving it more than a passing glance, other than to note the irony of its presence here at the end of a block comprised almost entirely of shops devoted to the sex trade. But he’d been raised Catholic and still had some fleeting attachment to Catholicism’s rites and rituals. There was a certain comfort in the familiarity of a religion that, for the most part, he’d left behind in boyhood. On a whim, he decided to go inside.
    A few people knelt in prayer. At the altar, a priest was preparing to give Mass.
    Nicholas found a confessional and slid inside. He confessed to his adulteries, to the myriad indulgences of the past few days – the group sex, the gay sex, sex as dominator and as dominated. But finally, having exhausted that part of his confession, he said, “I met a woman here who worked a miracle for me. Only a few days ago, I had AIDS, and now the results of two blood tests have come back negative. This woman cured me. I don’t expect you to understand this, Father, or to believe it, but she cured me by – well,