When they were together, they dined extravagantly. She ate so little. He said he liked how she was wasteful, that it was one of her best qualities. He ordered course after course, food presented with delicacy and precision. Even after things had gone bad, he insisted that they still take the trip to Europe. She had never been. 

He’d taken her to Las Vegas, to Palm Springs, to Miami, had introduced her to hotel suites with multiple bedrooms and wrap-around balconies, to a New York City apartment with a library and a full kitchen, to Oxycontin, and to the app on his phone that he used to trade stocks on his father’s advice. 

“You want to date a girl who has been to Rome,” he had said.

What a life it was.

He was saying she wouldn’t understand the Hegel she hadn’t read if she didn’t understand the Husserl he had read. He mumbled, in the din of the restaurant, so quietly that she couldn’t follow. She nodded, letting her mind wander in a wash of feeling. What was the feeling? It felt as if she had become one with the dim leather booth, the tinkling cutlery of the restaurant.

“It’s just sad that you’ve never been to Paris,” he was now saying. Across from him, she tried to become aware of her expressions. She tried to imagine how she looked, but it was as if she had listened to him talk so much that his face had become her face, all she could see was his face superimposed onto her own.

“I know I said we should cancel the trip but now I think… to go along the Seine, in the same path where Baudelaire and Voltaire had walked… the men of that era really got to plumb the depths of a certain sadness,” he said.

The part of her brain that remained active was for responding when appropriate, automatic and canned: “What about all of the sad literary women?” 

“The women of that era were just sad,” he said. 

She nodded, not in disagreement.

When the check came, the waiter demurely asked to see his ID, explaining it was their policy. 

“Sometimes people pay with other people’s cards,” the waiter said.

“Oh, she knows,” he said, gesturing to her. “She’s been doing it her whole life.”

▲

Rarely had he seen his dick so hard, he said.

They met on an app. It wasn’t usually like this with girls he met, he said. Night in, night out, you took them to dinner, all of them, even the most boring normal girls fucked, no condom, laying there motionless, moaning long after your dick had gone soft, moaning when it was half smashed into her thigh, not even inside. All that boring fuck me like your stupid slut yes daddy shit. Most girls were like this, he said. But it was easy if you knew the tricks, got your swipes in, convinced yourself to keep an open mind, kept the follow-ups brief enough to get them to meet up, to meet now, immediately.

Back when they were still having sex, they spent the afternoons reading and writing. He decided they should write something together, a novel. It could be about "the narcissism of the couple."

The time they tried to write, she transcribed while he told her about items of clothing he had once owned and had lost: 

“I keep thinking about this sweater I used to have. And I was thinking about this leather jacket...” 

He trailed off. 

She made a note in the doc: the importance of clothes.

▲

In the days leading up to Europe, she began to worry about what to pack. Once in a while he’d bought clothing for her: $300 jeans and a high-neck navy wool dress—things that seemed to have been purchased with someone else entirely in mind.

There were a few things since then: that Hegel book, French lessons at a private school that she’d quit after the third class, the first time he’d called off the trip. He stopped having sex with her two months ago. He was still paying her rent.

She was explaining this situation, inexplicably, to the person behind the counter at a small vintage store, who seemed uninterested but in a languid, comforting way.

She looked over the sparse racks. She’d learned, with him, to notice the trace signs of wealth: the soles of shoes, the thread counts of fabrics, layers of off-beige that matched other layers of off-beige.

She was thinking about something she’d told him. One of her earliest memories was watching her mother paw through the trash-bag of hand-me-downs—“Bugle Boy,” she’d gasped, holding up a perfectly ordinary shirt.

She chose a sleeveless Prada Kids shirt that buttoned convincingly enough, bangle bracelets that would rust, a pair of short denim shorts, and a dress that she had to try on, tugging the curtain from the nook to find her reflection.

She turned and tried to surreptitiously bend over a bit. The salesperson took notice: “That’s a shirt, actually.”

▲

The trip didn’t start off right. With each restaurant they passed, he grew more irritable. “It’s full. It’s too empty. It’s packed with tourists.”

“Here,” she said, finally, looking through the glass of a place with one empty table, “I think these people look French?”

A waitress rushed them in and immediately brought two wooden boards of charcuterie and a carafe of wine. 

“I think this is all they have here,” he said, pouring himself a glass of wine when a host appeared with an accordion and began playing “All You Need is Love”.

“For our Americans!” the host said. It was a sing-along restaurant, she realized. The host began singing, smiling, gesturing for them to join in. The girl, who had a great fear of public singing, joined each time prompted, her voice high and unsure. It was a simple song, a song everybody knew, she thought. She looked over at him. He focused intensely on the cheese.

▲

It was in Arles, in a suite with large windows that opened over the ruins, when they began kissing, and he pulled away. “Let’s wait until later,” he said. 

He wasn’t sure if they should go to the ruins, or if they should save them for early tomorrow. 

He was unpacking when he realized they were getting low on the oxy. Maybe they should just get really high, one last time, he suggested, and then decrease the dose. She spent the evening lying on the heated bathroom floor, throwing up in spurts now and again, though not unpleasantly. On the floor next to her, he closed his book. “I was just thinking about whether one could create a completely original work, a pure work…”

She was thinking about the statue of St. Genevieve they’d seen at the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. She told him she’d read that Saint Genevieve was a virgin and ate only two meals a week, that St. Genevieve hallucinated famously.

She began vomiting again. When it ended, she went on, telling him about a book a friend had once loaned her that likened nuns to prostitutes. Both existed, the book said, in spaces where women lived outside the role of “wife,” outside of the ownership of men.

 “Woman, conceptually, doesn’t exist outside of man,” he said. 

The following morning they were awake early enough for the Roman amphitheater to be empty. She was still high.

“But women are only angry in terms of their relationship to men,” he was saying.

“Aren’t men sad in terms of their relationship to women?” she said.

“Yeah… but women really make it a focus.”

Along the banks of the Rhône, she excused herself to vomit against a wall. She felt dainty and almost spiritual, as if all that had mattered before no longer mattered... not that she could pinpoint what those things had been exactly. 

▲

Now that they were sleeping in the same bed again she was determined to have sex, but he kept finding reasons not to. “I feel suspicious of your power,” he said. “I wonder if you only derive it from men.”

Mostly the days were light. She wore the shirt that was a dress, bending over or pulling it up, to flash him, whenever they were alone in some desolate area of a museum or cathedral. He would roll his eyes or laugh. 

At dinner he ordered burgundy snails, fried black pudding, duck foie gras, sweetbreads in butter. She smoked cigarettes and drank from the bottle of wine until it was time to go back to the room, where they would fight.

She would lie on the bed while he went to sit on the toilet, leaving the door open, talking to her, as he always did, completely naked, sitting on the toilet then standing up to wipe his ass. 

“I can’t believe you wore that red lipstick to meet my friends,” he said. “Don’t you see your whole thing—the red lipstick, it’s… this aura of feminine violence that you project.” 

He looked at her, contorting himself toward the toilet paper in his hand.  

▲

It was around Saint Remy that they started making up characters, pretending to be other people. At first they pretended to be religious zealots. “Put down your phone, my sister, let your heart be a vessel,” he said, wading into a lake while on a hike.

But then he got stuck for days on being “Jenny,” a 13-year-old cousin he had imagined.

She would be eyeing a dress in a street stall, touching the light fabric, and Jenny would scoff: “Of course that’s the one you would pick, so tacky.”

She tried to imagine a character who might be traveling with Jenny, but it was difficult.

“Oh my god,” Jenny said, looking at a tray of sterling silver necklaces. “Tommy bought me one just like this. I’m going to buy something for Tommy.” 

The girl rolled her eyes. “Jenny,” she said, “Aren’t you still a virgin?”

Jenny stared at her. “I bet you don’t even know when you lost your virginity. Not that you’d know what it’s like to have a guy buy you a necklace if he wasn’t buying it just so he could have sex with you. But I mean, you! You’d sleep with anyone!”

At first she found it funny, his ability to imitate the way adolescent girls can be so cruel to each other, but then it started to actually feel like she was a teenager all over again.

▲

The night they ran out of oxy entirely they were at a seaside town in Southern France. She had imagined the South of France would be utterly chic—instead she found it full of college kids on vacation, tacky Euro-dance music, giant frozen drinks in plastic daiquiri glasses. 

They’d had a fight. She was too skinny, he’d said. She was too needy, either she was complaining about being broke or she was sad they weren’t having sex. “I know not every guy is like this,” he’d said, “but I’m attracted to strong women.” 

He said this all through the open doors of the bathroom, its mirrors reflecting into the mirrors of the room, so that no matter where she stood, she could see him sitting on the toilet.

The more unattractive traits he found in her, the more of a compulsion she felt to commit to them. She found herself growing more erratic, needy, stupidly seductive, in an attempt to prove— maybe to herself—that he wanted to be with her. 

She went for a walk to give him space. Antibes was quieter than Nice and she was disoriented to see so many older British couples on holiday, strolling together in their khakis, after a late gelato. It was an image that kept repeating itself, the cliché of a couple who’d come undone and were trying to reconnect with a vacation.

A tall young man with thick hair was walking toward her. She made eye contact. 

“Bon soir,” he said. 

She said she didn’t speak French. 

She walked with him to the shore, where it was less crowded. He asked what she did. 

“E-cri-vain?” she said, as if she weren’t sure.

They moved carefully to a large rock at the edge of the water. 

“Ah, I see you know the French kiss,” he said. “Most Americans do not know the French kiss!” 

He kneeled on the rock as she stood, raising her dress so that he could eat her ass.

▲

When she returned to the hotel, he was asleep in bed. 

When she would recall the story later, she would decide that she had probably given the French boy a blowjob, honestly she was unable to remember. She knew that the moon had been low, and that the air had felt silvery on her skin. The point was only that she had gained a new perspective. She could continue. 

▲

“I keep telling you this,” he said. “I feel suffocated. I don’t know if it’s you... or the idea of a relationship in general. I just feel like this will toward coupling is a disease. You keep saying that there’s growth in being in a relationship. But I just don’t see it.”

She was annoyed with the architecture, with the churches, with sightseeing in double through his gaze and her own. Just thinking about it made her sluggish. 

She tried to find things to talk about. 

She considered whether or not St. Genevieve would like her and concluded that she probably would not. What mattered, though, was that there was something about the space inhabited, which she admired. She tried to explain it to him: the lunatic anorexic, lost in her visions.... she had found a way to live in an inner world.

“But it wasn’t her world,” he said.

The more he talked, the more she disagreed with his interpretations. Yet still there was some core to what he was saying that she couldn’t say wasn’t true, at which point he’d suggest they drop the argument.

▲

In Italy, she’d hoped, they’d start having sex again.

She dreamt that they had sex. In the dream she felt disgusted by it, but she woke up incredibly turned on. 

“American girls are the most difficult because of their privilege,” he said as they walked by the seaside, dipping their toes into the clear waters full of sharp rocks and tiny shells. 

He’d wanted to go to Turin, to walk where Nietzsche had hugged a horse. They walked along the cobblestone and he talked about insanity. She knew the story, how Nietzsche was said to have gone insane at an open-air market when he witnessed a man flogging a horse and ran to hug the animal. She wanted to add something to the conversation but all she could focus on were the women on the street. Their sexuality impressed her—compared to France—all the cleavage and hips. She turned to look as women passed, languid and buzzy. She wondered about the number of erections in the street.

She decided she liked Torino. She liked the lore of its black magic vertices, the idea that the city opened to a portal. One of the few entrances to the underworld, on Earth, was near The Piazza Statuto, the gates of hell radiating a demonic energy throughout the psychic make-up of the city.

“I knew you’d be into it,” he said, playing Jenny, “with all that voodoo shit you pretend to like. Probably to get guys to like you.”

But when they got to the statue, she felt an absence she couldn’t place. She felt nothing. What had she been expecting? It seemed for some time now she had been trying for some realization but it was as if her own interiority was absent or in the room next to her, muffled and out of range.

▲

It was getting dark. They were dining al fresco at a restaurant in a little pastel house that looked out onto other little pastel houses. He had ordered too much antipasto, and while he took a phone call, she fed the carpaccio to a street cat.

The cat had been going from table to table, doing the same bit again and again.

“Okay, okay,” he was saying into the phone, his face serious, listening.

She was feeding the cat when she noticed a second cat, who was in the grass, smaller with a tortoiseshell coat. The cat’s eyes shone, as though she were conscious of her own anxiety in proximity to people and, also, of her beauty to them. The first cat had been bringing the food back to the second cat, placing it at her paws in the grass.

“Maybe she’s pregnant,” she thought, then laughed, realizing that the whole scene was so ridiculous, the sort of thing you wouldn’t even put in a story.

Another tourist noticed the two cats and got up to take photos. No, she thought. You'll ruin it. The cats ran away.

She looked at him. He was still on the phone. It was then that she realized he'd been talking about money. 

“Not the black card,” he was saying. “I had that card because I’ve always had that card.” 

By the time he hung up, she understood. 

His parents had found out he’d been putting everything on one of their credit cards: “Which they never check, so my brother must have told them. And they know about the thing I was doing with PayPal to get cash…” 

She did the math on how many more cities were left on the trip and how little money she had:

“I mean what– what all was going on the card?” 

“All of it. The rooms, the dinners… your rent in New York…”

The last one came as a shock, as she’d thought that he’d owned the space—a small apartment with yellow overhead lighting, the only communal space doubling as a cramped kitchen, a place he’d let her stay for free with several roommates who wrote him a check each month.    

He ran his fingers through his hair. She felt a tingle of emotion, but distantly, as if she were an actress playing herself, in her own life.

▲

How would she explain what happened next?

They didn’t fuck in Italy. They didn’t fuck until Berlin, and then only because they had done molly. They went on through Europe, doing all they knew to do, which was to keep dining out and drinking. They stayed in shabby and shabbier rooms, going on until it was done. 

She wanted to become a stranger to him. She had hoped that the card being cut off could change them and that they could be new again. All the while, she knew it was impossible. She could feel like an actress, but she could only act as versions of herself. And whatever he saw, he hated her for it.

Back in New York, they hadn’t talked for seven days when he asked her out for coffee. 

Now that he was in trouble with his parents financially, what was she going to do, what was her plan, he asked. She’d already made one, because she’d had to: she’d dropped into a small strip club the previous week. She had worked the day shift after being hired on the spot, and although she'd made $300 it was largely from one man who had taken pity on her and bought a private room so she could “have a good first day.”

She felt she had somehow misunderstood the wants of her customers.

He shook his head. “I guess that means we’re breaking up, then, if you’re going to be a stripper.” 

“Can I ask you something?” she said, a little embarrassed. “How do you... give a lapdance?”

“The secret is you have to find the dick and never move from it,” he said, as if this was something that she had long needed to hear.

She thanked him.    

“You know,” he said, his voice even, controlled. “I know you think you can elevate your class status by doing sex work. But all you’re proving is that you can’t.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d talked about her options. She bet he’d rehearsed that line, sitting on the toilet before he left the house, getting it just right, saying it aloud to himself as he stood up to wipe his ass, talking to her as if she were still there.