Just before I put pen to card the Inferno said, “Write something nice.” I nodded and wrote: “Dear Lola, I hope you live forever.” I handed the card back. The Inferno scrutinized it but didn’t say anything. If she knew my message was a curse and not a blessing, she didn’t let on.

Then the Inferno said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Brian wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Brian.”

“That may be so, but I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“He’s sort of my ex-boyfriend.”

I sat up and looked at her. “Sort of?”

“We went out briefly.”

“And you still speak to him?”

“No, I mean, the other day I ran into him,” she said.

“You ran into him,” I repeated. I didn’t like the sound of this. No matter what anybody says, I know that people don’t really just run into each other.

“Well, why does he want to talk to me?”

“He thinks you might be able to help him get his job back.”

“His job? Me? How?”

“I don’t know, Jasper. Why don’t you meet him and find out?”

“No, thanks.”

She looked annoyed, rolled over, and turned away from me. I spent the next ten minutes watching her naked back, her red hair spilling over her shoulder blades, which jutted out like surfboard fins.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t put yourself out,” she said back.

Our honeymoon period mostly consisted of staring at each other’s faces for hours on end. Sometimes that’s all we did for the whole day. Sometimes her face drifted in and out of focus. Sometimes it looked like an alien face. Sometimes it didn’t look like a face at all, but a bizarre compendium of features on a blurry white background. At the time I remember thinking that we’d fastened onto each other in such a sticky fashion it would be impossible to separate without one of us losing a hand or a lip.

Things weren’t perfect, of course. She hated it that I’d not yet dropped the habit of mentally noting all the famous actresses I’d like to sleep with when my ship came in.

I hated it that she was too open-minded and half believed in a creationist theory that had God go “Ta-da!”

She hated it that I didn’t hate fake breasts.

I hated the way when she was mad or upset, she’d kiss me with her lips closed.

She hated the way I’d try everything to open them- lips, tongue, thumb and forefinger.

Whenever I’d heard anyone say “Relationships are work,” I’d always scoffed, because I thought relationships should grow wild like untended gardens, but now I knew they were work, and unpaid work too- volunteer work.

One morning a couple of weeks into the relationship, Dad ran into my hut as if he were taking refuge from a storm.

“Haven’t seen you in a while. Love must be pretty time-consuming, eh?”

“It is.”

He looked to be bursting with bad news that he couldn’t hold in much longer.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. You enjoy it while it lasts.”

“I will.”

He stood there like stagnant water and said, “Jasper, we’ve never talked about sex.”

“And thank God for that.”

“I just want to say one thing.”

“Get it over with.”

“Even though using a condom is as insulting to the senses as putting a windsock on your tongue before eating chocolate, use one anyway.”

“A windsock.”

“A condom.”

“OK.”

“To avoid paternity suits.”

“OK,” I said, although I didn’t need a sex talk. Nobody does. A beaver can make a dam, a bird can build a nest, a spider can spin its web at the first attempt without even fumbling. Fucking is like that. We’re born to do it.

“Want to read anything on love?” Dad asked.

“No, I just want to do it.”

“Suit yourself. Plato’s Symposium won’t be much use to you anyway, unless your girlfriend is a thirteen-year-old Greek boy. I’d avoid Schopenhauer too. He wants you to believe you’ve been had by the unconscious desire to propagate the species.”

“I don’t want to propagate anything. Least of all the species.”

“Attaboy.” Dad put his hands in the tattered pockets of his old tracksuit pants and went right on nodding at me with a half-open mouth.

“Dad,” I said, “remember how you said love is a pleasure, a stimulant, and a distraction?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, there’s something else you didn’t mention. And that’s that if you could save the person from ever having another splinter in her finger, you’d run around the world laminating all the wood with a fine, transparent surface, just to save her from that splinter. That’s love.”

Dad said, “Huh. I’ll make a note of that.”

The next night when I got into bed, I found something bulky under the pillow. It was thirteen books, from Shakespeare to Freud, and after staying up all night and skim-reading at least half of them, I learned that, according to the experts, you cannot be “in love” without fear, but love without fear is sincere, mature love.

I realized I’d completely idealized the Towering Inferno, but so what if I had? Sooner or later we have to idealize something- being lukewarm to everything is inhuman. So I idealized her. But did I love her or not? Was it a mature love or an immature love? Well, I had my own method of working it out. I decided: I know that I love and am in love when suddenly I fear her death as sharply as I fear my own. It would be lovely and romantic to say I fear hers more than mine, but that would be a lie, and anyway, if you knew how deep and complete is my desire to perpetuate through the eons with every particle intact, you’d agree it was a romantic enough fear, this terror of the death of the beloved.

So I called her sort-of-ex-boyfriend, Brian.

“It’s Jasper Dean here,” I said when he answered the phone.

“Jasper! Thanks for calling.”

“What’s this about?”

“I was wondering if we could meet for a drink.”

“What for?”

“Just for a chat. Do you know the Royal Batsman, near Central Station? We could meet tomorrow at five?”

“Five twenty-three,” I said, to exert some control over the situation.

“Done.”

“What’s this about me helping you get your job back?” I asked.

“I’d rather tell you face-to-face,” he said, and I hung up the phone thinking he must have either a low opinion of his voice or a high opinion of his face.

For the next twenty-four hours my whole body pulsated with curiosity; this idea that I could help him get back his job confounded me. Even if it was somehow possible, why assume I’d want to? The worst thing you can say about someone in a society like ours is that they can’t hold down a job. It conjures images of unshaven losers with weak grips watching sadly as the jobs slip free and float away. There’s nothing we respect more than work, and there’s nothing we denigrate more than the unwillingness to work, and if someone wants to dedicate himself to painting or writing poetry, he’d better be holding down a job at a hamburger restaurant if he knows what’s good for him.

I only just got through the doors of the Royal Batsman when I saw a middle-aged man with silver hair waving me over. He was in his late forties and wore a flashy pin-striped suit, almost as flashy as his hair. He smiled at me. That was flashy too.

“Sorry, do I know you?”

“I’m Brian.”

“You’re the ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re old!”

That made him smile unpleasantly. “I guess she has a little something for celebrities.”

“Celebrities? Who’s a celebrity?”

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“No.”

“Don’t you watch television?”

“No.”

He looked at me, puzzled, as if I’d actually said no to the question “Don’t you eat, shit, and breathe?”