LITMIR.BIZ

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      I said in a loud, assertive voice: “Sebastian’s parents would never let their kids watch TV. That’s why they grew up so creative. When Sebastian first came to my school, I’d only ever read The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High.”

      “Who’s Sebastian?” said James.

      “But then he introduced me to all these books. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.” I turned to James. “Have you read them?”

      He shook his head.

      “I thought Sebastian was a genius like Miller,” I went on. “He said he wanted to make my ovaries incandescent like Miller. But when we did it the first time, they didn’t go incandescent. So Sebastian.” I laughed. “Got really angry and started punching the wall and going insane. It was funny. Because he wasn’t really like that—he wasn’t insane.”

      James lay back on the bed. Then he sat up again.

      “He wasn’t really a genius either,” I said. “When we were about thirteen he told me that I wasn’t in love with him—I was in love with love itself. He said it was a privileged form of mania because apparently a lot of artists and writers had it. He said he didn’t have it, and he seemed really angry about that. But I was sure it was a curse—whatever he said I had. It must have been a curse because it meant my heart didn’t belong to—myself. It belonged to someone other than myself. It belonged to him.”

      “So you like being owned?” purred James.

      “No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.” I laughed. “We ran away to Paris after our SATs. When we were fourteen. We left in the middle of the night and got the bus to Dover. Sebastian had stolen the money from his parents. Then we got the ferry. It was amazing—we went out on the deck in the pitch-black darkness and you couldn’t see the horizon. Everything looked black. We got wet from the water.” I laughed again. “Obviously. It was the sea. We stayed away for three days. My mother went fucking crazy but his parents didn’t even notice that he’d gone. They thought he was on a school trip that they’d forgotten about.”

      “Hmm.”

      “When we came back, there was this awful meeting with my mother and his parents. His mother said that we should give our children roots and wings, but my mother said that ambition is the best form of contraception and the French are notoriously sex mad.”

      “Yes, you are.”

      “She said that France is a sex mad country, but Sebastian’s father said: ‘But a lovely place for a romantic weekend away at this time of year.’ Sebastian said his father wanted him to die because he was too tall. My mother tried to stop me from seeing Sebastian, so I ran away to his house and lived there. I used to always feel so safe in his house. I only went back home when she said I could carry on seeing him, but she threw all the party invitations from his parents straight in the trash. She hated the whole family after that—because they were louche. His parents were always having parties.”

      James was tugging at the ends of my pussy bow. He realized that it was stitched in place. He unzipped the blouse at the back. My hair got caught in the zip. I lifted my hair up and he told me that the nape of my neck was exquisite. I felt like I would cry—the way he was touching me was so gentle.

      “Get off,” I said.

      He paused. “All right.” He paced the room. The carpet was salmon pink. “I know you’re young,” he said. “I mean, I know I’m old.”

      “You’re not that old.”

      He had unzipped his trousers. I could see a swarm of Bart Simpson faces on his boxer shorts.

      He knelt down before me and clutched my hands. “You’ve talked about your lost love,” he said. “Now let me talk about mine.”

      I yawned. “All right.”

      “When Margaret died, I thought I could never love again. I thought I would never see another woman’s face who I would know, just know. That familiarity is.” He closed his eyes. “What I miss the most.” His eyelashes were gray. “I know you were only joking when you said you loved me before, because you can’t love me, because we only just met.” He released my hands. “Why would you love an old man like me?” He stood up and fiddled with the iPod on the wall. He turned the TV off.

      The song began: “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

      “Turn it off,” I said. “Please.”

      We lay next to each other on the bed for a long time.

      “It’s a coincidence that you like pussies,” I said, eventually. I had my back to him. “Because I once rescued some pussies from a refuge.”

      “Where are they now?”

      “Oh. I don’t know. I had to take them back to the refuge.”

      An hour passed.

      James heaved himself on top of me. He whispered in my ear: “I was always faithful to Margaret, right to the end. I cared for her for eight years. But she always said to me: ‘After I’ve gone, James, please feel free to impart jouissance to whomsoever you do wish. Otherwise it is a crime against women.’”

      “A crime?”

      “Yes. And let me tell you, there was crime in her jouissance too. The way she howled when she came. It reminded me of an animal caught in a trap.” He rolled off me. “It was the same sound that she made in the hospital bed during her last moments on earth. She howled like she was coming. She howled because she wanted more of life.”

      His tongue slid into my mouth; I pulled away. He sucked on my nipple like an energetic little baby and I let him for as long as I could. Then I sat up and lit a cigarette. Out of the window, I watched the traffic circling around something in the distance.

      “This is a nonsmoking room,” he said.

      I put my cigarette out on the lid of the truffle box. “Would you say that Margaret was your muse, James?”

      “Perhaps. I never thought of it before.”

      “Because there was this one time that Sebastian and I were sitting on a bench outside Finsbury Park station and he was like: ‘I never believed in the concept of the muse until I met you.’ We were about eighteen. I had no idea what a muse was. He said a muse was a mythic woman who inspired men to make great literature. The men extracted her feminine essence. She couldn’t create anything herself. Sebastian said he was going to extract my essence. He sounded really mean when he said that. I got up and I was like—I remember that he was smoking a Marlboro Menthol—I’m not your fucking muse. Then I ran off. He caught up with me. He said that being a muse could be really sexy like Betty Blue. We had watched that film recently. I said: ‘But the woman goes crazy. She gouges out her own eye.’ And he said: ‘But the man writes a novel about it, so it’s worth it.’ And I was like: ‘It’s worth her losing an eye?’”

      James stuck his finger inside of me.

      “Yeah,” I went on. “So like a couple of months later, our teacher entered us both for this writing competition. We both got short-listed. We had to go to the Royal Festival Hall. It was really boring. The man who was a poet or something was going on and on and then he announced the winner of the prose category. Sebastian won it for ‘The Reluctant Muse.’ He went up to the stage like a fighting cock and read a bit of it—something like: ‘“I’m not your fucking muse,” she shouted into the biting North London wind.’” I laughed. “I was shaking because I was so nervous but it turned out I won the poetry category. So it was fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look at him. My poem was called ‘I’m Not Your Fucking Muse,’ and there was a line in it which said: ‘I’ll fuck you up.’”

      “That’s charming,” said James.

      “On the way home, the teacher was going on about how Sebastian and I were going to be like Ted and Sylvia. ‘But Ted cheated on her,’ I said. ‘And

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