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Bailey’s.”
    He reached across the table, grabbed my hand. I let him hold on to it. He said, “So! What have you been doing all week?”
    “Masturbating.”
    “Ha! ha! Masturbating!” He looked toward the bar as if expecting the men there to laugh along with him. “Listen.” He leaned his face forward, “I must tell you the truth. I’ve been seeing other people.”
    “What do you mean ‘seeing other people’?”
    He pulled his hand and face away, took a sip of the Hennessy, then leaned his face forward again. “You know: other women.”
    “What other women?”
    “A bunch.” He smiled. “I’ve been sleeping with them.”
    “Since when?”
    “Since last week.”
    The waitress showed up with the wings. “Here you are, sir. Enjoy!”
    He dunked a wing into the blue-cheese dipping sauce and started gnawing on it. He’d been fucking all week. He pushed the plate of wings toward me. “Help yourself.”
    “Tom, you told me you haven’t been with many people.”
    “When did I say that?”
    “After you screwed me.”
    “Did I actually say that?! I can’t remember.… But if I did say it, then I was only telling the truth. You were only the third girl I’ve ever slept with. The first two were in high school. They were terrible! I had the worst sex. You were good. But this past week has been incredible. You’ve changed me, raised me to a new level.” He smiled. “Thank you.”
    “Tom,” I calmly said, “I thought we’ve been seeing each other.”
    “No,” he said with surprising, firm malice, “we haven’t been seeing each other. We’ve been talking to each other. You are a smart girl. I enjoy talking to you.”
    “Tom, why did you fuck me?”
    “You fucked me!”
    “I’m not joking, Tom. Why did you fuck me?”
    “What’s more important: talking or fucking?”
    “That’s not the question.”
    “Look, you’re a smart girl. You’re good-looking. What more can I say?”
    He reached across the table, covered my hand with his. I pulled mine away. He rubbed the side of his foot back and forth against my ankle beneath the table. He said, “Susan, I’m sorry there’s a misunderstanding between us, but why can’t we just be friends? Why do we have to drag in all this emotional shit?”
    “Do friends fuck each other?”
    “If you can’t fuck your friends, then who can you fuck?!”
    He wiped the blue-cheese dripping from his lips, gnawed on another chicken wing. I said, “What about love?”
    “Love! Love! Where do you see love?! It’s a Greek chimera. They used to say ‘I love you’ before they buggered a little boy.”
    “Excuse me.” I got up.
    “Where are you going?” He grabbed me by the elbow. “The bathroom.”
    I sat on the toilet. There was something ludicrous about my peeing, with my ass hovering above water and my vagina, a recent venue of so much drama, returned to its original function, a Narcissus contemplating itself. It is humiliating to be compared to, to have one’s body compared to another. It is humiliating to have one’s body compared to itself. He said that I was “good,” and that the first two girls were “terrible.” My naked body was an installment, one in a series. My breasts, rather large, with their brown, diffuse areolae, would now be seen in the light of other breasts, their relative merits carefully weighed and remarked upon.
    He could, I suppose, if he wanted to, become a connoisseur of labial folds, of clitorises, and of ass hair.
    He looked up from his plate of bones. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
    “Let’s go.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Back to my apartment.”
    “Now?” His eyes sparkled. “But first let me pay for this.”
    “It’s paid.”
    “See you later,” the house painter said as we walked past him.
    Outside it was cool, the first sign of autumn. I walked briskly, slightly ahead of him. He said, “What’s the hurry?”
    I laughed and broke into a sprint. He ran after me.
    “You silly girl!”
    As