Driving through the narrow, cobbled street behind the Hyatt and a sudden flood, remembering him sneaking out in the morning. We had dinner with my grandfather. I wore a dress the color of an emerald. I hadn’t seen him in months. The three of us ate dinner. We all said goodnight then he and I stood in front of the hotel under the dim light, embracing with a strange sort of benevolence we’d hadn’t been able to harness in years. And he followed me back in, back up, and we had sex in my hotel room on white sheets, in a room I now can only remember as anemic, as lacking anything of him or me. And yet, the disproportionate number of times we’d made love in exactly that situation—a hotel room, transient.

That night, he stripped himself to me completely and I remember how strange it felt, his entire self like warmth and honey in my hands. And in the morning, we walked out the back of the hotel and he kissed me deeply. So deeply that no part of me was expecting the call that came later that afternoon, everything he’d given suddenly retracted. Stiffness. Coolness. A forced regret, which was, of course, infinitely more insulting than actual regret. We kept getting disconnected, the line clicking out. I stood at the window with the phone cord wrapped between my fingers and staring down at the hotel pool. He was asking me to leave him alone, to let him go, some vague part of me could understand that. And despite my ability to argue and contest, at a certain point the pain was too recognizable, too stubbornly familiar, and I just thought, what’s the point? My life was about to begin anew and I could sense that my Los Angeles was going to be very, very far away from his Los Angeles.

This all flooded through me in an instant as the question jumped unwelcomed into my brain: when was the last time we made love?

Index of Self-Study