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still swam before me in a sea

of golden fire. “What does it mean?”

“Mean?” he said, dabbing the place

with something cool and liquid,

and all the lights were blinking on

and off, or perhaps my eyes were

opening and closing. “Mean?” he said,

“It could mean this is who you are.”

—Philip Levine

Because I know where to look, I can see the blue star even across the crowded ballroom. It smolders at the tip of Janet’s left shoulder blade, above the wedding gown. It looks entirely of her body—at this distance like a birthmark. Only at a conversational closeness will its strict geometry reveal it to be a tattoo.

At thirty, Janet quips the tattoo is the best investment she has ever made. As this day approached, her conservative Korean parents offered her escalating sums of money to have it removed, or at least to hide it. But here it is, blue star on brown skin between bands of black hair and white gown. Like a painting of Bethlehem after Rothko.

As I watch her, a ripple passes over her back, meaning she is laughing. She grasps the hand of one of the aunts in hanbuk, who has flown in from Korea for the occasion. Janet’s voice is wry and authoritative, surprisingly deep for her small fine-boned body. So while she laughs frequently, her laughter sounds like something bestowed. At the reception that has just ended, her maid of honor broke down in tears as she gave her speech. Janet hugged her with a tearless laugh. Why did this gesture—which would have seemed brusque in another—stir such warmth in me when made by her?

The summer between my two years at Oxford, in the midst of my great depression, I went to stay with her. Janet was living at the boarding school where she had finished a year of teaching English. She would start medical school in the fall. The term had ended long ago; the dormitory swelled with the silence of a structure not fulfilling its purpose. Janet had sent in grades for her students, boxed her 572 compact disks, and stored all her books except for the Norton Anthology of Poetry, from which we memorized a poem a day. Between us, we could name the nine muses.

Both of us knew that in the coming year we would change, that we would have to change, and that, as her father said on her answering machine, the road to hell was very wide. We packed it—black box of the future in a cardboard one of denial. So, while neither of us used the word “sanctuary,” that was where we lived then. The outside world was a picture framed by the window, no more real than the neighboring photograph of zebras on the Serengeti.

I remember watching her as she fell asleep one night, her white shirt tied at the waist. The blue under-sheet of the futon showed her still as a continent against an oceanic expanse. I was a cartographer, student of her. I watched her and thought of her purple dress, her dreams of tigers in the trees, how she balanced on her heels as she stood in thought.

Janet wrote her undergraduate thesis on Milton. There is a moment in Paradise Lost where Adam asks the angel Raphael how angels have sex. Raphael blushes “celestial rosy red, Love’s proper hue,” and answers it is nothing so crude as human intercourse, as angels find no obstacle in “membrane, joint, or limb.” Rather, he says: “Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace / Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure / Desiring nor restrain’d conveyance need / As Flesh to mix with Flesh.” Since I heard them, these lines have limned my dream of sex—discorporation, clean mixing of molecules, no bodies or bedsprings, just a passing through.

I watched her and thought of these lines, wondering why I could not love her. If I wanted Milton’s angelic mingling with her, why would a body be a barrier? I still return to this question without an answer. A friend speaks deeply to it when she says she became so ill in her adolescence she effectively did not have a body for a period of time. Since returning to it, she finds herself unable to care much for “shapes”—whether people’s bodies are male or female, tall or short, large or small. As someone who aspires