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“Why do you hate your life?” Although I already knew. I knew the answer would be Terrance Maxwell.

“Oh.” This came out soft and drifty, like a small note sung. “Terrance.” Her shoulders slumped when she sighed.

I thought, Here we go again.

Last year, Natalie and Terrance broke up, to borrow a phrase from mainstream society. It was only after they broke up that I learned the full and complete story about Natalie and Terrance, about what their relationship really was. I knew he was forty-one, a former semi-professional tennis player and a patient of the doctor’s. But I never knew why he had sought treatment in the first place: his alcoholic mother burned to death in her easy chair. She was drunk and dropped her cigarette. Oh, and they were lovers, Terrance and his mother. According to Natalie, Terrance could never accept the fact that he wasn’t quite good enough to be a professional tennis player, and his mom was the only person who could console him.

When Doc found out Terrance was a millionaire he put two and two together: his rebellious daughter and the millionaire fuck-up who always ran around in tennis shorts, even in winter.

Natalie and Terrance were lovers from the first week they met. He was forty-one and she was thirteen. Soon after, she moved into his house.

Terrance became Natalie’s legal guardian. So as far as everyone was concerned, they were father and daughter. And everyone believed this. Or at least acted like they did.

Except the doctor. He knew they were lovers. He, of course, believed that at thirteen, a person was free.

But when Terrance gave Natalie a black eye and she came running home at sixteen, people asked questions. And it all came out. All the black eyes, all the drunken brawls, all the smacking Natalie around and calling her horrible names.

In a whirlwind of family peer pressure, Natalie pressed charges.

Natalie and Terrance went to court.

Terrance lost.

Natalie had won. But what had she won? Aside from seventy-five thousand dollars in a civil case, which went straight to her father, what had Natalie won? Freedom from her abuser, I guess.

“I miss him,” she said now, raking crumbs off the table with the edge of her hand, spilling them onto the floor and then dusting her hands across her jeans. “I know it’s sick, but I really loved him.”

“I know.”

“It’s hard,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just really hard. I wonder what he’s doing?”

I knew she was picturing her old life in her head. The old life that included the Bang & Olufson stereo, the 1965 Rothschild wine, the burnt-orange Saab, the Martin guitar. Conveniently absent from her memory was the fact that she was his dirty little secret.

“You’re so dirty,” he used to tell her. “Filthy. Those disgusting bare feet. Can’t you clean yourself up?”

But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks—accidentally—and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.

I was probably thinking this way because of all the foreign films I was seeing at the Pleasant Street Theater. Instead of going to school and drawing happy faces in my notebook or hunkering over a joint on the soccer field, I was seeing black-and-white films by Lina Wertmuller, French movies where first cousins fall in love and then stab each other as a weeping clown appears, representing the loss of innocence. These esoteric and maybe very bad films were highly inspiring to me.

So there is a love like that and that’s what Natalie had with Terrance and that’s what I had with Bookman.

This is what bonds us, Natalie and me. We are living