A full list of articles

Losing It
By Lori Liebowich
No lover but the first will ever know me as both a child and a woman

Infidelity Inc.
By David Hudson
In Germany, a new service takes all the fuss and muss out of having an affair

Love and reading
By Alain de Botton
A reader's valentine: The delightful and dismaying similarities between love and reading

Passionate and penniless in Paris
By Maxine Rose Schur
A magical memory

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Quickly I was sneaking over two, three, four times a week to pin a ratty towel over the fire-escape window and go at it hammer and tong in her ratty sheets, in the clutter of her fifth-floor walk-up. We couldn't get enough of each other. She was like some extravagant hot fruit in my parched, hungover, miserable life. She was emotional like a child, quick-tempered. She had intoxicating, dramatic style. She took a shoe off in the subway and threw it at me, right in public.

Finally, I couldn't do without her. I couldn't bear her dating other men. Cupid had the barb in, and played with it. In a hushed, wooden voice I mumbled to my girlfriend what was going on, and that I couldn't give it up, and that I'd better move out. She shook and wept and held her head. I left, saying I just needed some space and time.

And then the real fun began. My relationship with my girlfriend was through, but we couldn't really face that, not for a long sad time yet, and because of this, I couldn't truly love Suzie. And because, well, I just didn't. She sensed it. She sensed her shabby little place unnerved me about her. She was neurotic as it was -- look who's talking -- but when I'd duck ever saying flat-out, "I love you," it would stab her with sudden misty-eyed, rocking pain. It would rev her into fury -- in-my-face, spectacularly provocative fury.

That became the constant undertow of our affair: her fits of rage, at which I'd rage back, and which I'd goad further by tearfully breaking things off, only to connive them back on, shamefully and shamelessly, like a sick game, to get back to the heat of her body, but without the cost of that precious "I love you." Just what the doctor ordered for a volcanically vulnerable woman.

Call me sensitive, call me refined. Call me Cupid's soiled toy.

For close to a year, a brat's playthings, we had two main activities: fucking and screaming. Boozing, too, of course. I strained to live an internal double life, to symbolically stay not-gone from my girlfriend. I ground away in Suzie's bed, I stooped over her spread-legged in her hammock, I dived down on her shuddering on the carpet. But I never let her take me in her mouth -- that was intimacy I reserved only, and Byzantinely, and under the circumstances abstractly, for my estranged girlfriend.

I would even, I swear, torturously chop vegetables with a motion different from the one I used in my girlfriend's kitchen. Cupid just leaned against the fridge, shook his head and grinned at his handiwork.

He laughed out loud when the cops showed up a second time, and the neighbor downstairs threatened Suzie with a hammer for the screech of her voice, and I'd slink off to the grimy back footage of the friend's loft I paid a few dollars for, now that my girlfriend had given up our lease and moved away. I'd slink off trembling and quivering from the shrieks we'd begun the day with yet again. Suzie would actually wake up in a state of full-blown grievance. It was astounding, terrifying: From her pillow, an eyelid would pop open over a great brown glaring eye, and the screaming and recrimination and sobbing would begin within seconds.

"We can't go on like this!" Whoever writes these lines must do it for the residuals. The rebroadcasts, ad horribilem.

The strain got so bad, I had the hiccups for over a week, twice. I gulped Maalox by the pint, and in jerking despair swallowed down a tiny amount of the antipsychotic Thorazine, which is the standard therapy for severe hiccups, it was explained. Indeed. Cupid clutched his tummy and guffawed and guffawed.

"We can't go on like this ..."

Finally, one morning, with her weeping in fury in the shower, I snatched up my overnight bag and bolted out her disorderly door. From my new address, far far uptown and not known to her, I called to announce, in a flat, heartless voice, that it was over. Finally. For the sake of both our sanity. I really meant it this time. And I hung up for good.

Of course Cupid just cackled from the hallway and made wee-wee on my door.

And then the real fun began.
Feb. 13, 1998

Barry Yourgrau is the author of "The Sadness of Sex," a book, and the star of the film "The Sadness of Sex," opening at the Quad in New York City on March 6.