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“If one looks at only the physical world, no, of course not.” She strode across the glade in her peculiar lopsided gait to stand in front of me. “But the universe is so much more than that, isn’t it?” In the tone of her voice I could sense that she was asking something else entirely.

Curious how these moments of transition came upon me. Once again, I found my consciousness cast back in time. The image of Donnatella, slightly drunk, stood before me. I had met her in Mexico, where she had come with her husband and sister for a vacation. While her unconscionable husband was romancing her sister, Donnatella and I sat in quiet, leafy Oaxacan squares and drank mescal. This had the effect of keeping the stifling heat at bay and also of arousing us to seizures of unbridled passion. Thinking now about those erotically charged moments in her hotel room or in mine I could for the first time see where it all went wrong. They were fierce, those sexual encounters, yes, but—and it hurts so much to admit this—they were also essentially joyless. It hurt because it showed me how little we really had, what small people we were together. It occurred to me that with Herman, Donnatella was a better person—and that hurt as well. To say all of this hit me with the impact of an express train was something of an understatement. Up until that moment I was absolutely certain we had loved one another, even after she and Herman ran off together. But now I knew better. Our love, like a billboard with a half-naked model, had been nothing more than wishful thinking. The sad truth is that Donnatella and I coupled for all the wrong reasons, and we married for them as well. Twelve hours after her divorce came through, wham, it was done: we were married. It was a seductive but poisonous start we made for ourselves, sitting sprawl-legged, drunk on mescal and each other, groping moist flesh beneath the plank table, under the somnolent, watchful gaze of the Mexican waiters. To this day I hear the soulful strum of a Mexican guitar and my eyes glaze over. But I suppose the truth is that all the while Donnatella was pleasuring me she was thinking of her husband and her sister, and of revenge.

No, we never loved one another. Our personal flame wasn’t even passion so much as rage—a rage at everything around us. And this rage—this demonic passion—made us safe. For a time. And then it vanished. You couldn’t even say our relationship was over, because it had never really begun. I curiously never stopped liking her. With Lily she was a saint, going to see her almost every week when I never would. She and I had the most god-awful fights about that. She’d often say it was a mortal sin, my ignoring my sister, and who knows, perhaps she was right. Then again, being Roman Catholic, Donnatella was consumed with all the conflicting quirks and superstitions that go along with the religion. I often wondered how she rationalized two divorces. Once, when I asked her, she told me with a curious kind of contempt that her uncle knew the Pope and had managed to secure for her some form of dispensation. To this day. I have no idea whether or not that was true. Anyway, I’m not sure it matters. She was certainly kinder to my sister than she was to her own sister, but how can I fault her for that? I can’t. I won’t. She’s a unique person and in the end I’m glad we met, even if I got to know her too well and too late. But when you come to the quick of it—when you strip away everything that doesn’t matter—she was never mine, and the deepest pain comes from the years of self-delusion that she once was.

The enormity of these revelations made me sick to my stomach. It was as if the world had turned to ash, as if memory like some terrible swift scythe had mown down a shining field of illusion. My illusion. Now all at once Donnatella, the languorous, leafy Mexican square, the sweaty furtive couplings, the plangent guitar music outside the cracked hotel window wavered and grew insubstantial