“She has terrible handwriting, doesn’t she?” he says, and when I lower the paper and look at him, I see him, the man who took me to the park. He smiles, this small cruelty hanging in the air between us. And though I can tell he feels a little bad about having said it, he seems relieved when I join in.

“It doesn’t even look like English,” I say, and here is a brief account of the month we spent adhering to the rules: First, to my great disappointment, the second date does not yield any sex. I starve through the whole night on gin and little bits of bread, and we stumble through the dark and fool around in the park. The fact of us both being shadows facilitates a compulsive honesty between us, and I tell him that during the weekends, sometimes I lie in one spot and don’t move until I have to go to the bathroom or to work, and he tells me that he is sterile, and we laugh because rule number one is that we cannot have unprotected sex. But after we laugh, he is sunken in the middle, withdrawn in a way that is cemented by drink, and we watch a bride float through Washington Square at midnight, the tulle and taffeta blue in the gauzy light, and I think about his wife and wonder if she is right-handed, if she is self-conscious about her handwriting or beautiful enough that she doesn’t have to be. And when Eric turns to look at me, whatever connective tissue is responsible for securing his eyeballs has been boozed to a mere suggestion, and because of the wind I can sort of see where he is beginning to lose his hair, and someone across the way is playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the guitar in a minor key when he seems to find one complete moment of sobriety and focus this violence on my mouth, which fits into his unevenly in a way that makes our kiss asynchronous and wet, even as we are chapped from all the gin.

* * *