That hot June afternoon a few days later, he showed up at my apartment sweating in a wife-beater and apologising formally about his need to perform ablutions. On the walk to the L train, manoeuvring the heavy bags down the stairs to the platform, and during the ride to Williamsburg and the five blocks to the biggest branch of Beacon’s Closet, where I thought I’d have the most luck, he talked pleasantly, endlessly. He then aimed this verbal stream at the salesgirls behind the counter. In a knapsack, he’d brought a motorcycle jacket and a wool suit to sell and detailed their provenance as he laid them out on the table. Montparnasse, twilight, piazza, youth.

(In his defence, I later found out that his mother fell down the stairs drunk and died; he could not begin to live up to his father’s bad-boy reputation; he had a powerful rich stepsister who intimidated him; his own lumpy nothing of a sister embarrassed him. He was constantly trying to compensate for his own shoddy provenance.)

I had never heard talk used so effectively to deflect communication: it was counter-intuitive and a remarkable feat to witness. M. was teaching me the value of silence and patience. So I packed more bags, we took more June and then July trips to Beacon’s Closet, all to the soundtrack of his faded observations. We carried knapsacks of coins to the coin counter machine in the bank on 14th Street where you won a pencil sharpener if you guessed close to the correct amount. M. guessed $84 on $86; he was very pleased with his prize.

Eventually the talk moved from the street to my apartment. I remember the first time he sat on my sofa (upholstery cat-clawed down to internal wood), which was then in front of my left living-room window – I can track years by the position of that sofa: against the back wall (1980s), in front of the fireplace (most of the 1990s), under the right or left window (early aughts). He looked out onto Sheridan Square and talked about his girlfriend in Washington DC. She expects too much from me. He’d mentioned once, walking me home, that he had a long-distance relationship, but I didn’t entirely believe in this woman’s existence, at least as a legitimate girlfriend. What does she look like? I asked. She’s a petite lawyer who makes gobs of money, he said. The word ‘petite’ sounded stilted to me. She wants me to commit to this trip to Aruba. He argued at the air about this. And here was the unintentional crux: This haunts me, he said. We were in her Audi driving to a dinner party, and she double-parked so I could run into the store to buy a bottle of wine. I got out of her car, took a couple steps and fell flat on my face on the sidewalk, I was so drunk. She was fiddling with her phone and had not even seen. I stood up, went inside and bought a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, got in that car again and cruised through the whole damn dinner. This story made me question – as I do when I look at a visual trick like the vase and the faces – which is the primary reality? The fall or the evening on either side of it? Perhaps he was a pretty prop for her. He had large, beautiful hands and feet like a kitten’s, tawny blond hair like his father’s, but he had his mother’s stair-plummeting eyes.

M. started cooking dinners at my apartment and inviting our AA group over – my sponsor, the Buddhist bellhop; the two jazz brothers; Pet Food Jay; the conspiracy theory writer from Minnesota; the ageing Williamsburg artist who’d had a career in the 1980s; and the Southern girl who lived on the corner and changed her name from Angela to Autumn. M. was territorial and sensitive about cooking. When my sponsor wanted to add some lowbrow guacamole and chips to M.’s highbrow salmon meal, M. pouted. They fought it out and my sponsor made a little fun of him and took it in stride, opening the tortilla chip bag with an explosive sound and a wink.

The AA group started referring to M. as my little dog because he followed me everywhere and seemed happy to be included. My relationships with men always progressed in a similar way to my relationships with furniture: if offered to me, I took it and felt obligated to keep it. On my living room floor stood a parade of broken lamps. I could not seem to let them go. I was always about to get them fixed, but I never did. This pattern of reluctant acceptance went one step further with men: if I disliked someone on offer, I felt guilty and had to head straight toward him.

My last boyfriend, the finale of that final drunk year – following a string of guitar players of descending talent – was a very fat guy who worked at National Public Radio. After I recorded my 9/11 poem, he followed me out and asked if I’d look at his poems and give him some pointers. He offered to take me to lunch at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. Because it was clear that he also wanted to sleep with me and I felt repulsed by his fatness, I had to go through with it. To atone. He was so fat he actually hurt my thighs and he was frightened of breaking my loft bed, so the next day he took me shopping at Ikea to buy a Captain’s bed that sat firmly on the floor. He helped me buy a new television and he had a stereo delivered to my apartment, as a gift. He worshipped me for exactly two months, then dropped me after a night of drunken arguing.

In early sobriety I got involved with a skinny ex-actor and musician who used a ukulele case as a kind of purse. He even called it his purse. Eventually he started seeing a twenty-one-year-old while he was seeing me (I had just turned fifty) and I showed him the door, but two months later I let him in again and he continued to see the twenty-one-year-old. Finally during a phone conversation, he said You’re too good for me, and in a moment of clarity I agreed, and we broke up.

M. and I spent more time together. He manifested out loud the way I felt inside – which in boating terms was run aground. I wanted to pry him loose. I practised compassion and also urged him to speak less, as an experiment. It was very difficult for him and those moments were highly charged. He turned red and fidgeted, then he had to talk about not talking.

In the evenings, my daughter came and went with her tap team friends, their chirping voices magnifying, then receding. The living room was her room, so M. and I often had to decamp to the bedroom; we could hear them practising their dance routines: Samantha, No! It’s step-ball-change-shuffle-kick-shuffle – wait, no, is there an extra shuffle there or only on the break? Shit! hahaha. I could hear the girls giggling in the kitchen, making macaroni or a Betty Crocker cake. On Tuesdays the tall SAT tutor would arrive – always exactly on time – and sit for two hours on one of our broken chairs at the table. Before he arrived, M. and my daughter and I piled all her junk under a blanket. I have to beat back the blob, I joked. M. liked participating in our rituals. My daughter’s bed was a monstrosity she’d designed with her dad (the carpenter) – it had tall ends that were supposed to house shelved cabinets with doors, but he never finished building it, so the exposed sides were dark maws of pressed board that filled up with tossed-in sneakers and clothes and books and Sharpies and notebooks and broken pencils.

I couldn’t bear the beauty of my own life with my daughter – I ran from it as if from a burning building. I spent an inordinate amount of time holed up in my bedroom listening to M.’s voice droning like an air conditioner, while my real life blazed in the living room. On M.’s one-year AA anniversary, I floated the idea of a relationship (in AA you’re supposed to wait until you have one year sober to get involved). He wanted to talk about it. No, I said. Let me see where you live. M.’s apartment was not far from mine, but he’d never invited me over. As we walked down Sixth Avenue, he tried to diminish it: a sublet, tiny, untenable, indefensible, etc.

It was charming. Bare and white: white painted floors, an old dropleaf table like mine in the kitchen, a dresser like mine too, and a custom handmade bed and mattress, much better than mine, from an exclusive SoHo shop I’d always admired but never dared to enter. He sat down on the bed and I said, Let’s take our clothes off. He balked at this, but obeyed since he was my dog. After disrobing, he cowered, shivering in the most distant corner, and apologised because he could not get an erection. He explained the reasons in detail while I admired a wooden box on his dresser – it had a secret compartment. He told me I could keep it. He dressed and we walked back to my place. I carried the box. I never took off my clothes. It all happened very fast, like a scene in a Marx Brothers movie.

My bed was up against my windows then, and we got in it. It all seemed absurd and beautiful. It’s you. It’s M., I said out loud in the moonlight. He was good in bed.

The next day we aired this whole new relationship at our meeting, and the reaction was similar to my own, with a less sentimental tone: It’s M.! She’s with M.!?

The celebratory mood quickly shifted. The second morning I heard the locks turning as my daughter left for school, and before M. and I had even had coffee, I was trapped in the Hamptons in the 1960s in a morose but sentimental history of his father, his stepmother, his whole family. M.’s voice grew mournful and hollow as he slid off-track into irrelevance, finally ending somewhere in Key West.

That night we went to see Midnight Cowboy at Film Forum, and afterwards M. grilled me. Why did you like it? What about it exactly did you like? I was crying, unable to wipe out the image of poor lame Rizzo dying in his Hawaiian shirt on the bus to Florida, a scene so poignant and sad I could not even imagine what needed explaining. But why? Why? he kept asking, falling behind then rushing at me like Rizzo. For the first time I noticed how pigeon-toed he was, and how much shorter.

He started pulling back from seeing me almost immediately. He had to proofread a history textbook. A flat-rate job he spent days on, and came in at less than five dollars an hour (I resentfully calculated). I asked him if he could get work for me at the same company – they were short of proofreaders – but he refused; he was afraid I’d be faster (yes, much!) and they’d somehow find out. He insisted on wearing a three-piece suit to his interview at another textbook publisher; it made him look antiquated and desperate. Add to that the nervous talk of Paris sky at dusk and you had a non-hire.

I was watching him baste a roast at his apartment the night a certified letter arrived. For months he had neglected to pay his storage bill, and valuable correspondences and mementos from his father’s estate had gone to auction and sold cheap. He’d have to buy them back at a premium. How could you have missed all the payments leading up to this? I was outraged that he still had a small pile of money and could afford to mismanage it. He threw himself onto his magnificent bed, and I argued down at him while the roast overcooked.

The following week I stood at the window looking out for M.. He was ten minutes late, then fifteen, eighteen. This felt disrespectful. I thundered downstairs to meet him. You’re late, I pointed out pointlessly, and fumed all the way to Citarella in silence. At the fish counter, watching the lobsters bang into the tank with their rubber-cuffed claws, I erupted in accusations that lasted all the way through the check-out line and the video store, where I refused to offer input, and he chose Klute and La Dolce Vita. We came home with our grocery bags and videos to find my daughter Skyping with the boy she had a crush on; she coached him in Calculus, and teased him wittily when he missed all the answers. She was a whiz at Calculus, and I loved listening to their banter, but I didn’t. I retired to my room, slammed the door and sulked while M. cooked a terrific meal – salmon with ginger and scallions – for the three of us. I consoled myself on my bed with my long cat, Ralph (who M. called Stretchy). My daughter came into the bedroom and tried to cheer me up: Mommy, come on! Don’t be such a baby. You can start the evening over. I want you to eat with us. I came out sheepishly and sat on the huge Kevyn Aucoin book we used to cover the missing cane on one of the cane-sprung chairs (Kevyn Aucoin had taken my first headshot – for that abandoned career – before he became a famous make-up artist). After our tense delicious dinner, M. and I spent the rest of the evening in bedroom-court. Our rental movies went unwatched.

One night when my daughter was at her father’s, M. and I had a particularly aerobic fight, and he left the apartment. I ran down the stairs after him, begging him to come back. I may have even grabbed his leg and pulled him. To cap off these fights we had perfectly choreographed sex in his custom bed, or my bottom-of-the-line Ikea bed that had been my daughter’s (I’d sold the better Captain’s Ikea bed that the fat guy helped me pick out). One night he searched through his extra room (where he hid all his junk – he had his own ‘blob’) for the vibrator, and never found it, while I stared at his ceiling and mentally remarked on the obscene high-quality comfort tof his mattress.

Because I was so broke, I tapered off my anti-depressants and the world started to wobble and pulse. Walking beside M. I stopped on the sidewalk and slapped my face. Insults flew down the Hudson River path, from Christopher Street to Battery Park. Threats. Dropped gauntlets. I could have been at home reading, enjoying my cats, or the sweet trill of my daughter’s voice on the phone with her friends, but this is what I did.

There was a memorable night in Elephant and Castle restaurant that my AA sponsor and I still talk about. M. sat frozen and would not respond in any way to either of us. He seemed hollowed out, empty. I’d invited him to Cape Cod with my family and he could not see himself going as planned, considering how he was feeling. I must arrive a few days late, he insisted dramatically. No, that’s ridiculous, I said. He had to come with me. My boyfriends were always changing but I had to have one to face my family. The two-timer with the ukulele purse had come the year before.

Memory sorts events. M. did come, and that summer I saw my first gay wedding, two men on the sun deck at our rental cabin community. Before the ceremony M. and I had sex in my sun-drenched attic bedroom. I wore a long pink silk tunic and lime green silk pants to the wedding. Fresh oysters, a fresh fight later, a long walk down the wooden stairs to the bay to burn off steam, no recall of my daughter or the rest of my family.

The last day M. and I and were together we took a trip up to the Cloisters. (I’d been there only once, for a fun picnic with my friend Randy, a couple of years before he died of AIDS.) The sky was blaring blue and the trees seemed to snicker. Inside the museum I stared at ancient tapestries and M. made historical comments. I was angry at him for having lunch with an AA fellow I’d introduced him to, Pet Food Jay, and not inviting me. It was childish, but I couldn’t shake it. He’d been secretive about it, as if Jay were his lover. He was behaving this way to infuriate me, I thought, but I took the bait. We sat on a bench outside and watched the Hudson move by. My head grew bigger and heavier. On the downtown subway platform I leaned forward ominously and looked at the rats and puddles, and in the train car I tried to simply focus on my breath. IN faith, OUT fear. Everything hurt. He left me at 14th Street, but I called him later and begged him to spend the night. I’ll spend the night if you’re suicidal, he said. I am, I said, and so he did. And that was the last time.

A few months after we broke up, my daughter graduated. I went to the ceremony with Phil the drummer (one of the jazz brothers). Phil joked that M. was Little Lord Fauntleroy in his short pants with a lollipop. He’s just too small, Phil said. You never liked M. – that’s why it wouldn’t work, Autumn sagely pointed out at an AA lunch.

After my daughter left for college, I realised I’d spent most of her last year of high school behind my closed bedroom door. I’d killed the time I could have had with her. I felt the weight of all those days and nights and events and spaces between events I’d missed. Mommy aren’t you coming to the tap rehearsal, they said you could come? The senior parent party? The school picnic? The lunch, the dinner? Can you walk me to the train? Daddy and I are going to the park, want to join us? No, no, no. I had drifted farther and farther away, and none of it was M.’s fault. I had engineered the whole relationship. And I’d started drifting long before I met M.. All the blackouts, the ‘naps’ in the bedroom with men whose last names I can’t remember while she was in the living room doing projects – once she made a turtle out of leopard material, stuffed it and sewed it herself, she must have been ten – Here, Mommy, see? I leaned down languorously from the loft bed. No, Mommy wasn’t here. Mommy didn’t see. I gripped my crummy bed now as if it were a life raft. The floor tilted and roiled and I feared what was under it if I fell through. My mind kept replaying the insanely fun all-nighter my daughter and I had pulled her last semester, analysing Emily Dickinson’s poem: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ for Ms D’Amico’s English class. We’d made popcorn and added Raisinets – salty/sweet, our favourite. And the ideas had popped all night; my daughter and I channelled those stanzas until she had written the best possible paper (stringent Ms D’Amico gave it an unprecedented A).

That poem had been prescient. The pounding boots, the coffin – I was inside it now, moving downward. As I began to fall, I heard a faint flat voice – was it the radio? – saying something about hills at sunset. I hovered on the line just before the plank broke: