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kitchen, along the balconies that give onto the central courtyard. The Summer Residence is bustling like a hotel on a Friday morning. Men and women group in the courtyard, on benches and around picnic tables. I have not seen women here before. They too are in similar after-hours workwear – slacks and pencil skirts and sleeveless knitted tops, sensible shoes. One of them glances up at me and smiles, making me feel alive. I would like to add her to my album. I wonder if my house has been left intact, if the album is still on its shelf in my bedroom: in it I have a photograph of every woman I have pursued. It’s the old kind, with plastic sheets over adhesive backs that have lost their glue over the years, and the photos have started to escape the plastic film holding them down, to creep off the pages. This is what old age does to a man: even past conquests want to escape you. My daughter used to beg me to get it out, to tell her the tale of each woman as a bedtime story. Bedtime stories indeed. I would tone it down for her when she was younger, make each woman the heroine of our romance, give her details about their dresses and perfumes and how they wore their hair. Later she became shrewd and probing. She wasn’t content with fairytales, she wanted to know who these women really were and how I had seduced them. Her first boyfriend was regaled with tales from the album – she invited him to my place for dinner and brought out the album when I brought out the coffee. ‘Tell us the stories, Dad,’ she said. ‘Start from the beginning.’ It only strikes me now that my daughter could easily have asked if I’d lost my self-respect.
    The first woman I slept with was the least attractive of them all; in the photo her knees are fat and dimpled. We skimmed over her, to get to what I like to call the model years. Two years, many models; I had just begun to grasp the power of making women feel wanted. The first woman I spotted from my car. At a red traffic light I stopped next to her and looked across, and at the next light I stopped behind her, noticed her left brake light wasn’t working, wrote down her licence number, and called up the traffic department that afternoon pretending we’d had an accident so they would give me her name. I found out where she lived and sent her flowers that evening with a note attached: ‘Your left brake light is broken. Call me.’ Within two days we had dinner plans. In the photo she is dressed in satin for a shoot.
    Much further on in the album is my wife. I decided to marry her on a Saturday evening, at a dangerous time of the day when the light was so beautiful I wanted to prostrate myself and offer a sacrifice to it. I’d taken her to an afternoon movie and came out of the theatre feeling vulnerable; afternoon movies have always done that to me, something about whiling away two hours of my life in a darkened room when it is still light outside. I drove her home but couldn’t find a space right outside her apartment, so I parked further down the road and walked her to the gate, a picket fence, about knee-high, shielding a tiny garden from trespassers. I don’t remember if we kissed goodbye. I had almost reached my car when I heard her shout my name; as I turned I saw her leap over the picket fence and run towards me in her boots, and when she got to me she jumped and hooked her legs about my hips and her arms behind my neck, and kissed me with such passion I decided to marry her.
    I learned about sex from animals – chickens, to be precise – like most poor boys. My mother, harried, asked me to go out to the coop to get some eggs one morning when the sun was high and I was less than twelve years old. I pushed the gate open and stood in the chicken run, to discover the cock in a compromising position with a hen. I shut the gate again quickly behind me and crouched beside them in the sunlight. He paused for a while, watching me suspiciously with one lidless black eye, then reanimated