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over my face and pretend he is teasing me. How can he know that? Does he have some strange Eastern sixth sense? When I first got here, he pressed the palm of my hand near my thumb and said, “Yooo . . . constipated. I know! I know!” And I snatched my hand away and laughed, and said, “Not at all, not at all!” But I was.
    I shouldn’t rely on the facts as offered by some half-price pregnancy test that is probably past its sell-by date. When I’ve eaten the Paydays, I make an appointment to see the doctor. They say I can see her tomorrow. I am not used to such promptness.
    I read theoretical papers on art history for the rest of the day and go to bed at nine, tired to the bone. I am not going to believe it until I am told by a doctor. It cannot be true. I hardly know Mitchell; I met him just a few weeks ago. Late August, at a gallery launch on 57th Street. I had gone with my friend Beth, who works as a curator at a cheekily expensive gallery down in the Meatpacking District. She always wears black, of course, and high heels, and her hair is smoothed and in a tight ponytail, like a Clinique girl. She’s got a degree in philosophy from NYU, and the combination of sex and brains means she can extract large sums of money from a high proportion of the men who cross her threshold. Come into my parlor.
    That night, when I first met Mitchell, Beth was swooped on by people in the New York art world, all air kisses and black leather. I moved away from the black leather people to find myself near a little coterie of men and women where the air kisses were still abundant, but the fabrics had changed. The women were in shiny golden cocktail dresses with leopard-skin accessories, not a tummybetween them, and in very high, pointy heels. I—well, I can’t remember what I had on. It might have been knitted.
    I pretended to look intelligently at the pictures so that nobody would notice I was on my own. You can’t, though. You throb with self-consciousness instead of thinking about what you are looking at. Mitchell—although I didn’t know who he was then—was leaning on the wall a few yards away, alone, a man in a black suit with a black shirt underneath, a glass in his hand. He was looking out at the street, at the trees or the people below, with a look of wistful desolation, as if he were a soldier, looking far off to where his wounds had bled. As I was moving from one huge and very bad canvas to another, he smiled at me. I smiled back. He came over, and I thought he was going to look at the same painting as I was—that practiced pickup trick favored by men in galleries—but he didn’t. He leaned on the wall between two of the paintings and looked straight at me. I thought it was a little bold to lean on the wall between two ridiculously overpriced pictures at the very opening of a gallery; surely you aren’t supposed to get that close to them? He just stared at me. His eyes are blue; when he laughs, they are as blue as the sky. When he stared at me that night, they were as cold as the sea. Perhaps because seduction is a serious business.
    “Are you very interested in this painter, or is it just that you don’t know anyone?”
    “It’s the painter,” I said, “I know everyone here. All of them. I’ve just decided to snub them all.”
    He inclined his head to the picture on his left, which he hadn’t even looked at, and asked me what I thought about it, and I told him.
    He says that when he first saw me, he decided to indulge in a mild flirtation for a minute or two, but that it is because of what I said about that one painting that he asked me out. All I said about the picture was that it was painfully derivative of Ivan Albright without the skill, and did the world need another miserable painting about How We Are All Going to Die Eventually? That is scarcely code for I’m So Hot in Bed You Would Not Believe It, butperhaps Mitchell was hoping otherwise. While I was still talking he cut through my words to say,