When it comes to this, I cannot help feeling that I am at the end of a fluctuation that originated with a single butterfly. I mean, with one half degree of difference, everything I want could be mine. I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news. Still, I can’t help feeling that in the closest arm of the multiverse, there is a version of me that is fatter and happier, smiling in my own studio, paint behind my ears. But whenever I have tried to paint in the last two years, I have felt paralyzed.

* * *

And Mark is not exactly pressed against the chapel ceiling or projecting this bleached, Warholian cool. He is a grown man in a duster who keeps fresh orchids in his office, collects polymer toys, and does Groening-esque renditions of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. And one day it was raining and 8:00 p.m., and he and I shared an elevator. He showed me a panel of a cunnilingual octopus, and the care he had taken to render this piece knocked me right over and onto his cock. But it isn’t like the others—the ecstatic rutting and cushy ether of the void. It is like I really need him. Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve. These men are often authority figures. And so Mark was very kind, taking me out and deepening my palate and ordering all the wine. He took me back to his apartment, the sort of New York real estate that seems impossible, lousy with light and square footage like some telegenic Hollywood lie.

* * *

The sex is okay but sort of beside the point, because in his drawing room there are buckets of Prismacolors, Copic markers, and oils. Rolls of raw canvas, cans of lumpy gesso and turpentine. Filberts, brights, and flats bound with soft camel hair. And while he has a light taste for libertarianism, he doesn’t ask me to do outdoor activities, so it kind of squares. We spend weekends in bed, moving quickly out of the first nervous touches into the realm where we are undeterred by the odd turns of the id. But of course, my failure is hanging between us. He is infinitely more talented in the thing I most want to do, and he seems to prefer it that way. It is silly how late this occurs to me, the carrots he dangles in his boredom, how casually he reaches for the stick. I see myself in the women who trail him, the moony typographers, the perky-breasted RISD grads. Still, eventually I go over to his house and beg him to look at my work. I get on my knees, offer up my sketchbook, and say goodbye to his apartment and the sinewy watercolors he sometimes shows me at 3:00 a.m.

There is a painting that I love by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes. In it, two women are decapitating a man. They hold him down as he struggles to push away the blade. It is a brutal, tenebrist masterpiece, drenched in carotid blood. Gentileschi painted it after her mentor, Agostino Tassi, was convicted of her rape. As I am working on a piece inspired by this painting, my father dies. I bury him next to my mother, and for weeks I don’t sleep and the mice eat all my fruit. Mark sends his condolences in a card, but then he stops returning my calls. He sends the drawings I left at his house in an envelope simply labelled stuff, and I leave him some voicemails that mostly boil down to him being a hack who only draws four-fingered hands, to how he is an impossible dweeb who needs to be kept away from women and shot into space, and a few times, yes, I stand in front of his house in the middle of the night. I draft some emails I don’t send and wander the halls of the office with all the things I want to say to his face. But when I see him now, when I go back into the stairwell next to Kevin’s office and see how Mark has remained unchanged, how he is flanked by two women and proceeding gaily about his life, I lose my nerve.

* * *

That night I meet Eric at a wine bar in the Village, and the man I find waiting in the back of the bar does not seem to be the man I met two days before. He is wearing the same skin, but more tightly, as if something immaterial and supermassive spit him out at the mouth of the bar and he is just going with it, waiting for me to call his bluff.

“You’re late,” he says after he orders a glass of C?tes du Rh?ne for himself and a gin and tonic for me. His tone is so cold, I can’t tell if he wants an explanation, or if this stern incarnation of him is a joke. He looks different, even older now, his suit jacket slung around the back of his chair. By contrast, the dress I’m wearing is 80 percent spandex.

“Sorry.”

“I just like to be on time.”

“There was train traffic,” I say, and he laughs.

“I don’t miss those days.”

“You don’t take the train?”

“No, I don’t,” he says, and I like him less and more. Less because he appears now to be soft and impractical, and more because this is something he can afford to be. “You look good,” he says, making a show of taking me in, and it feels good to be consumed like this, to have decorated myself specifically for him, and for him to sit on the other side of the table and unravel all the crepe.

“So do you. How was work?”

“I don’t want to talk about work. Do you want to talk about work?”

“I mean, I guess not.”

“Where is that wine?” he asks, and then a waitress is leaning between us to pour a thimbleful of wine into his glass, which he circles and then sucks impatiently through his teeth.

“Fine,” he says, watching closely as she pours the rest. He waves her away and takes a long, indulgent drink. “I’m a little nervous, so I’m sorry if I seem—” He takes another drink, directs all his attention to the middle of my face.

“It’s all right,” I say, but it comes out a little patronizing. He gives me a hard look and finishes his drink, which is something of a feat, as it was a very generous pour. The waitress comes back around and looks at Eric with big, admiring eyes. “Can I have a little more?” I ask when I see that my gin and tonic is mostly ice.

“Good idea,” Eric says, and we start in earnest on a few G&Ts. It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise. I ask for another drink and he pauses and laughs.

“Do you maybe want to talk about something else?”

“Why?”

“You seem a little tense,” he says, reaching under the table to touch my knee.

“Have you noticed how the waitress is looking at you?”

“Not really,” he says, and slides his hand under my dress. Our table is not particularly private, but I don’t want him to stop. I take another drink as he rests the back of his hand on the inside of my thigh. “So we have arrived at the second date.”

“Yes.”

“And you want to keep doing this?”

“Yes,” I say, even though I don’t quite know what he means.

“I’d like to lay my cards on the table,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “My life is established. I have been married to the same woman for thirteen years and our graves are right next to each other.”

“Sure.” It occurs to me that we are now having a serious conversation, but I have not even had a moment to pull my dress back down. He pulls out a piece of paper and flattens it out with his hand.

“And so to introduce something new into my life, into this whole”—he glances at the paper—“marital framework, there have to be boundaries.”

“Of course.”

“And those boundaries have to be established early. Because”—he grabs my hand, which feels like something he has practiced—“I think we should keep doing this. What do you think?” I think that thirteen years off the market has made him vulnerable in a way that feels unethical to exploit. And yet.

“Yes, definitely.”

“So, the rules,” he says, looking down at the paper. I steal a look, slide it out from under his hand, and this is the first time I make contact with his wife.

“Your wife wrote this,” I say, scanning what seem to be bullet points before what seem to be words. The paper is soft and deeply creased, as if it has been folded and unfolded frequently.