1. Exposition

He looks like your mutual ancestors: Skin the color of an olive blistering on ancient trees, each silver-tinged leaf a feather in the clipped wings of angels that failed to carry their prayers for a good crop. The ancestors relinquished the trees and sometimes more, sometimes vows fresher than their virgin brides, to the Mezzogiorno sun. High noon on the New World’s docks and railroads: Hot but bothered, swaggering under their sweat, “Guappu,” they teased each other in dialect. “Wop,” their foremen slurred at them in mistranslation. Soft-handed, sharp-tongued newsmen spread the word that Southern Italian men threatened the fairer sex, their better halves with the means to hire a washwoman, a “girl,” several shades darker than the darkest Sicilian.

Your people will make the same American calculation, trading their bloodied fingertips for your red manicured nails. Their solidarity for your supremacy. Two or three generations removed, you do not understand the attraction to one of your own until you meet him, one day, in your temperature-controlled newsroom.

You feel the heat build from clit to tit.

From his-and-hers cubicles on opposite sides of the printer, your early career ambitions and his mid-career frustrations surface in the digital stream of GChat messages that tick through the who, what, where, when, why, and how you’d like to fuck each other.

Whatever remains of your grandparents rolls over and out of their graves. They did not leave the illiterate Italian South for youse—the y’all of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor—to have cybersex between deadlines.

Youse aspire to be real writers, not the kind of Washington journalists interchangeable with stenographers.

In this way he is your teacher, too. You keep mental notes of your conversations, adding his favorite Sherwood Anderson collection (Winesburg, Ohio) and Tobias Wolff short story (“Bullet in the Brain” with its refrain, “they is, they is, they is”) to your growing syllabus.

You nod like a metronome when he mentions having played in a band called “The Dead Darlings.” You would rather die than admit you’ve never read Faulkner. You look up to him. You could be with him and be him if you try hard enough.

You are a second-generation kid encouraged to dream (“you can be anything you want to be”) and then dream on (“within reason”) when your aspirations lead you to a private university in the nation’s capital, 250 miles from Sunday sauce. If you hadn’t left the free in-state tuition money on the table next to the braciole, you would never have left. Period. You harangued your parents into borrowing and co-signing the annual tuition that cost more than their combined salary, the amount of credit a credit to their skin color as much as their frugality.

A birthright you mistake for bootstraps will lead youse to the same newsroom, compensating for its obscurity from which name-brand newspapers pilfer, without attribution, with mid-career starting pay and fully matched retirement benefits. You land Capitol Hill, the plum beat, two weeks before college graduation, thanks to your résumé stacked with congressional reporting internships. Proximity to power will pay off faster than your loans.

Congressional reporting involves a lot of waiting. You shift from heel to heel outside the House Chamber, the second story “floor” where 435 representatives vote if and when they feel like it. The dress code bans bare shoulders but permits any amount of cleavage, you learn on the job. You pace the length of the lobby, stopping at each chamber door and staring through the lattice windows to find the members you need to fulfill your day’s story assignments. Your questions interrupt their exit to the elevator or the bathroom. Other times you request their presence in the form of small white cards that lobby attendants deliver like carrier pigeons.

You are trapped in a live action “Where’s Waldo?” where Waldo is an old white man in a Brooks Brothers suit. God forbid the Senate vote at the same time—you sprint through the dome-capped Rotunda and lurk by the elevators. Sometimes you get through a round of 8 p.m. votes and cannot fathom taking the Metro home to no one.

The closest human touch is bored Capitol Hill Police officers tracing the curves of your hips, thighs, and calves with their handheld screening wands, longer than the guappu’s longest fingers wrapped around a spiral-bound notebook of bureaucratic quotes. Between press stakeouts and scrums, you imagine one, two, three of his fingers slipping inside you, a rain-slicked climbing wall where his purchase is your pleasure, the G-spot you’ve only read about in women’s magazines.

In his 30s, the guappu is just tasting the alphabet soup of federal agencies. He is based in the office, which you used to avoid with the ego you picked up from other congressional correspondents. The “newsroom” is a misnomer, a void with a supply cabinet that becomes your new excuse to return regularly, and dress accordingly. Low cleavage, high heels. Once you’ve cabbed or Metro’d back to the office, you walk by the printer for his benefit. Your new managing editor, another diaspora dreamer who could be a gay, first-gen version of your father, punctuates his goateed double take with forbidden double spaces:

“Those are Nancy.  Sinatra.  Shoes.”

Besides teaching you what “wet” means, your beloved’s origin story is much of his appeal. This boy, this man, seven years older than you, would please your father just enough. Your parents say they’re proud of you, but you can tell they resent the spoils of your layaway education. They do not realize you’d always buried the seeds of your opinions, opinions that needed the space to grow. That they see you as a changeling instead of their little girl makes you so sad. Bringing home someone’s “nice” Italian son would go a long way toward repaying your parents. They never have to know how he describes throwing your legs over your back for better access—

That he spends more time narrating what he would do to you than doing most, if any, of it is the kind of intermittent reward used to create addiction in lab rats.

You are the rat.

2. Conflict

When the guappu extends his arm into your cubicle, his introductory handshake offers to rewrite your sexual history, the sum of all you think you are at—

Twenty-three years old. You have done “it” with your long-term college boyfriend and two one-night stands you’d hoped would stick around for at least one more stand. What you want is to meet the love of your life, already. A fuck buddy will do. To anyone who’ll listen, you joke: You can’t give “it” away.

You belong to a generation of women who have been told that confidence is the confidence to pick yourselves apart until you’re nothing but pelvic bones cutting through low-rise jeans. Blame every pretty little thing and silly little girl and four-eyed wallflower who stumbles her way into a relationship by the end of the rom-com.

After every Merigan white bread of a fuck, you search for your period like the Catholic choirgirl you’d been before you pretty much stopped believing in God. You’re as loath to confess the extent of your adult atheism-disguised-as-agnosticism to yourself as your greatest childhood sin to Father Conway, who urged you to tell him what it was, already. To be fair, you didn’t know what to call grinding into your New Kids on the Block comforter until after you made your first Holy Communion and he made monsignor.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” adults asked the precocious child you’d been. A journalist, or better yet, a writer, if you could find a way to make a living from your own words.

You quote other people’s, instead.

Reporting is the practical career move for a descendant of farmers and tradespeople. Your aging maternal grandfather, il scultore, does not create art for art’s sake. Papa carves granite memorials, six-foot Virgin Marys and St. Anthonys with beatific eyes and aquiline noses. Some carry granite rosebuds the size of a newborn’s palm in their hands, the most challenging recreation of the human form. Papa says you can judge an artist’s talent in the knuckles and the nails, the ripple of tendons embodying the movement of an otherwise still life. His statues strain to be in motion, their sandaled feet threatening to kick open the folds of their robes. He preserves their modesty with rope belts, defining each link that cinches their forward motion, as if they might otherwise step off their assigned graves in search of heaven on earth in a Queens cemetery.

“The best museum in the world is a cemetery,” Papa says, and he is proud of his unsigned work, of the granite that won’t erode in the elements. Neither does marble, a softer stone at which he scoffs, in temperature-controlled museums where the names Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, and presumably some women continue to be preserved, and known.

Every byline you leave behind will be attributable to you. You will be remembered for—what? An article about the failed amendments on the highway reauthorization bill? Another game of chicken to fund the government at the last minute? Worse, it’s all behind a $10,000-a-year paywall for the kinds of “suits” your father once cleaned in his dry-cleaning shop.

What would a real writer’s life look like for you?

Your art model is the guappu. After every day’s deadlines, he writes. You picture him at night, at his laptop, with the gravitas and bourbon of Hemingway, another author you didn’t get around to in AP English. How can you ever catch up, let alone measure up?

There is a way. The guappu is already enrolled in the part-time graduate writing program that your company will fund under the guise of continuing your education for its benefit. He is kind enough to share the feedback from the admissions committee considering his application.

“After enjoying the deep narrative and internalities of some of your writing, we want to have you explain your sense of how creative nonfiction and factual writing intersect or diverge,” the program director writes. “We see great reporting, so tell us a bit how you did it.”

You internalize this advice. Forget “actions speak louder than words.” How we live must be authentic to how we write. Otherwise, isn’t every personal essay or memoir a lie?

You are eager to discuss this developing ethos with the guappu. That first Christmas, he offers to drive you home. Your parents worry about traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, so you decide to keep your train ticket.

He says he hopes he wasn’t too forward, signing his signature as a smiley face. He sounds like he’s flirting with you. Why is he flirting with you?

Wouldn’t his fiancée be in the car, too?

Nothing gold can stay, a line you’ve attributed to Ponyboy Curtis since seventh-grade Honors English. Journalism is verified gossip, and the latest, from the guappu’s lips to one coworker’s ears, is the engagement and the wedding venue.

Fangoool, you curse your attraction. You will not act on it. The other time was an accident. That first date where you got to first base with a congressional aide against a Washington Post newsrack? He stood you up on your second date, and the next morning, you awoke, alone, to an email from his pregnant wife. She was news to you and kinder than anyone deserved. Whenever the congressional aide runs into you, he scurries onto the House floor with the other rats.

You are no puttana. Sure as shit, you are no one’s gumara, a mistranslation of the Italian comare and a demotion from “godmother” to “mistress.” You could have stayed in New Jersey for that lifestyle.

For the next year, you and the guappu continue your friendship between the Capitol and the office. Twenty-three and disillusioned by politics: the canned answers, the late nights when your bill is stuck in a “vote-a-rama.”

You are lonely. You can’t get past a first date or first base with these poor imitations of the guappu. All they want to do is quote their favorite “Saturday Night Live”-spinoff movies, and you can’t keep up, you don’t want to keep up. You want to watch the guappu refinish the 1940s secretary-style desk with which he had “something of an emotional affair.”

The guappu stops by your desk with some regularity. Sometimes you chat with him about “Jersey Shore” and literary magazines. He lends you a copy of The Paris Review. The only magazines in your childhood home were incidental: Shop-Rite circulars and Costco Connection. You notice when he says “my” baked ziti, “my” apartment, “my” cats. The singular possessive adjective becomes a question you’re too chicken to ask.

You turn 24. You are accepted to the same part-time graduate creative writing program as the guappu and several other colleagues.

He remains a work buddy, far from your work spouse. Most of your dates do not deign to call you twice, or fuck you once, tanking the self-esteem you measure in units of male desire. You even dare to ask the guappu, his be-plaided arms atop your cubicle, if he has a single friend for you.

Catering to the male gaze, you freshen your makeup between work and school—his class is on Monday nights, too. Does he see you blush in the October dark when you perfect the timing for a “chance” encounter? You ask him to walk you to the Metro and for the next 20 minutes, youse match each other’s pace down an avenue named for a state. You linger at the station so he will, too. You make forgettable jokes about your dating mishaps, hoping they’ll draw out his relationship status.

At 24, you confuse self-deprecation with wit.

The guappu looks at the real you under the bronzer and blush.

“How are you single?” he asks under the jaundiced streetlight.

Now you know he is, too. Right? You need him to say it, to your face, on the record.

“You’re engaged, right?”

No. Not anymore. You’re paraphrasing him from memory; this isn’t a Capitol Hill interview that you’d record with time stamps. Your hippocampus preserves only your next words verbatim.

“I’m going to summon all of my cojones here and say if you’d ever like to get an alcoholic beverage, or dinner, that would be really nice.”

Wow, you think he says. You know he adds he’s very attracted to you. He backdates his lust to your introduction, more than a year ago, when he was engaged—and through his breakup in the spring.

He didn’t think you liked him liked him. He asks about his single friend you’d requested as a library hold.

“I figured if I couldn’t have cake, I could have a cupcake,” you say.

He laughs in the dark. He’s still preoccupied with his broken engagement, he says. He’s afraid he can only offer you crumbs, and because you are 24, and in lust, and maybe even in love, you lap them up from the gum-studded sidewalk.

“How do we leave this?”

“I think we should kiss.” He dithers; you wait. You can taste the coffee you drank during class; you didn’t prepare for this moment. He shares his mints. Walks you to the entrance of the Metro. Hesitates. Walks you back to the Metro pillar.

“Come here,” he says—a direct quote.

Youse kiss.

Youse kiss and he rubs his thumb over your throat.

Wow.

Youse kiss and you are so immersed in the sensation, you cannot retain it. Why do you stop and give each other sheepish waves? He walks the rest of the way home and before you lose reception underground, you call your one coworker-confidante and break the news with newfound sincerity: “I have butterflies in my heart.” You go home to your bed and because you are 24, you replay the episode of “The Office” where Pam and Jim kiss. You rub your clavicle until that sensation is worn away under your own thumb.

3. Rising Action

The next seven months reflect his newfound obsession with diagramming sentences from the writing course three semesters into your future. He was with his fiancée for eight years. You’re the first person he’s kissed since he was 22. “22!” They even stopped sleeping together before the breakup and the moveout.

He’s scared to be with someone new, and somehow, it’s worse that it’s you. Real feelings are at stake! (Subject; verb; adverbial prepositional phrase, the condition under which the real feelings hover between youse.)

Perhaps he could fuck a person in whom he wasn’t so invested. You are not that person.

One spectacular month together could end in disaster the next, he says, and how could he forgive himself for hurting you? But just know how he feels. He “absolutely aches for you.” If this love story unfolded in New Jersey, perhaps you’d tell him he can’t talk out of both sides of his mouth, a mouth that only stops making excuses on the infrequent occasions when his tongue parts your lips in the office stairwell.

He tells you not to wait for him. Unlike your childhood monsignor, you don’t want or need to know the details of his sins. You absolve him from guilt and tell him you’ll wait. How can you not?

You struggle to learn his rules and the pressure under which he’s willing to break them. All good writers straddle that line with the intention of your latest fantasy: challenging his tongue to untangle the black fishnet stockings that bunch between your legs. You feel out every online or IRL conversation for an opening with him, and you apply pressure on him to share the wanton thoughts in your head, because “consent” is not yet in your rudimentary white feminist vocabulary. It will be years before you acquire the language for his “power dynamics” and “gaslighting,” let alone “intersectionality.”

Snack breaks turn into debates about sex and writing. Writing and sex. The case of mooz v. mutz centers on how to make Frankenstein’s monster out of “mozzarella.” He wants you to wear the Nancy Sinatra shoes while you sit on his face, a seat at a table you never knew existed. He has a Rolodex worth of fantasies about making you come—“cum,” he spells it. When he’s in the mood, he’s giving.

Often he’s neither. On smoke breaks, you accompany him to the damp parking garage where more than one SUV boasts that the child who occupies its backseat is an honors student. He stands at a respectful distance because you do not smoke, an addiction that otherwise repulses you. But there is something erotic about how he holds the cigarette as taut as a tightrope between his top and bottom lips. He does not smoke wearily like other reporters after another day of editors bitching about imminent deadlines and sources returning calls after they had passed. Such squabbles seem only to energize him, and as he inhales lungful after lungful, he draws you in with the burning ash.

He grips the filter in his restless hand, railing about newsroom injustices, the short-sightedness of mutual editors, the error-ridden copy desk. The smoldering butt raps the air with the authority of a rubber-tipped pointer striking an invisible blackboard. Even his face has a professorial quality. Through the thick haze of smoke, his eyebrows arch like inverted checkmarks that a teacher might scrawl on a homework assignment for a job well done.

It is there, under his authority, that you fall in love with him.

It is there he berates you, too.

You. (Subject.) You push. (Subject, verb.) What might make him roll his ergonomic office chair flush with his desk to hide his “raging hard-on” one day, one minute, one cybersex of a sentence, provides the raw material for his regret the next. He pulls out of plans for lunch, coffee, happy hour, one-on-one and with your other coworkers. But the worst is when he gets mad at you. You push him, the direct object of all your affection, away, the adverb that describes how he stops talking to you for weeks at a time.

Sometimes he ignores your chats and emails, even when you’re checking in about his dad’s health issues. When you’re talking him through the pros and cons of a job prospect, which would take him away from his favorite extracurriculars: foreign film festivals and dumpster diving. From you, too. He teases you when you encourage him to stay, which hurts your feelings, and you say so. You aren’t selfish. Why make a lateral move to a mid-level rival when he’s capable of the Great American Biography or Collection of Essays? You believe in his ability with the devotion of Véra to Nabokov. You want to stroke his ego and his dick.

You’re tired of living in a guidonovella of literary filth. You try to workshop your feelings in your very first graduate-level creative nonfiction course, where you change his name and omit all the details that make him him. You tell him. He is flattered. He teases you about your draft, which you want him to read when it’s perfect. He is such a good writer, the best writer in the newsroom, in the program, besides your new workshop friend Audra.

At 24, you don’t understand that feelings are for journals that you might have to keep for years before you gain the necessary reflection for any good personal essay. Your professor is kind in her feedback.

“A refreshing mix of tough talking moll and vulnerable little doe,” she calls your “voice,” which cannot compensate for the piece’s lack of a “narrative arc.”

You, the author, lack structure. You, the character, idealize some guy. You, the 24-year-old, insist he is not some guy. Your professor drops the mid-workshop equivalent of an interrobang: “I know who it is‽”

Because you never hide anything of consequence from anyone and never, ever from the guappu, you tell him. You are sitting at a white-tablecloth pizzeria that you’ve talked up over the nearly three months it’s taken to get him to upgrade from snack and smoke breaks, and you are blowing it in real time.

He is furious.

He berates you between bites of artisanal crust while you stare at your full plate. You knew you—the singular and the plural—had to be secretive, for the sake of whatever propriety remains in the office. But you didn’t know you—the singular and the plural—were a secret. He’s a private person. You should have known better. You are sorry. You are sorrier that weekend than you’ve ever been in your life until he appears in your cubicle on Monday.

He is sorry, too.

“I guess it doesn’t matter if she knows,” he says.

He means, “She knows better than to tell anyone.”

He doesn’t have to ask for your silence. He buys it with his affection. Come the afternoon, youse get lunch with your co-workers; the next week, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, youse talk dirty in the echoing breakroom. You don’t remember how kissing him feels, you say, near tears.

“Are we really going to do this?” he asks in the stairwell.

“Yes.” Kissing him feels like—like—goddamn it, it is like a name on the tip of your tongue, but your tongue is in his mouth. You cannot form sense memories from overwhelmed senses. You know the facts: His hands reach for the green tweed of your backside. You move your mouth to his neck.

He pulls away.

“No hickeys,” he says, back at your apartment. Hickeys are for children, you think, if you think at all. He is a man. You remove each other’s glasses so they won’t clink together like a toast in your bed. His frames could swallow yours whole. A snake and its “pick me” prey.

You are close enough to kiss the shallow channel cutting through the underbridge of his nose. The soft tissue is called the columella, a word you will look up because you want to know every part of him. He’s nervous. He still hasn’t been “intimate” with anyone since his fiancée—with anyone but you. Youse hold off on sex sex, if only because he cannot fathom this next step and you cannot fathom a one-night-only appearance when it’s a lifetime around which you want to wrap your legs.

He lets you kneel before him. Finally, finally, you sit on his face. You come.

He goes.

If you’d read Hemingway by now, you’d beg him not to leave. “You don’t have to destroy me. Do you?” Papa—no, not your Papa—wrote in “The Garden of Eden” from The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. “I’m only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?”

You are almost 25—not middle-aged, but weary enough from past and present heartbreaks. Your desire is not a joke, and in his presence, you are not your own punchline.

He treats your tears with gravity. He’s only leaving now to feed his neighbor’s cats. Otherwise he would stay. He wants to be with you, but he’s scared, and finally, he gives you the reason he’s been withholding this whole time.

“My fiancée cheated on me with my best friend,” he says. You remember the line verbatim, no pillaged steno book necessary. That he shares this confidence, this betrayal, becomes the breadcrumbs from your grandmother’s meatball recipe.

They bind you to him.

For the first time since the debut of your guidonovella, you search the internet for his ex-fiancée. Google leads to their wedding registry. They must not have disabled it. The registry lists their wedding date, and her name.

Her internet presence is limited. An old MySpace page where she and the guappu are your age, pizza hanging from drunk mouths. Mutual interests in movies and men. She really cheated on the guappu? In one timeline, you’d be friends with her. In this timeline, you hate her for screwing you.

You don’t think about how her actions allowed the guappu to even go this far with you. You operate in the unparalleled selfishness of youth.

Snow covers the ground on the winter afternoon when the guappu frantically Gchats you. His ne’er-do-well father had another health crisis, and the responsibility for the man, for holding together the family, falls to the guappu, the real man of the family. You meet him by the elevators and keep him calm through the car rental process. He parks on the dusk-cloaked street between the local conservative synagogue and your apartment building. The only thing you can do for him is zipped up in his lap. You bow your head. You don’t know when you’ll see or taste him again. This is only the beginning of what you could give him. But he drives away.

The guappu grows irritable as his former wedding date approaches. He picks fights over your workshop story. Wasn’t he over it? Can youse even be friends? You fight in the stairwell where you used to make out.

It’s a relief when turns his former wedding date into a long weekend with two of his friends. They booked a cabin in Maine, he tells you and other co-workers. He played with their kid. He feels as fresh as Thoreau after a polar bear plunge in Walden Pond.

Your friends have never seen you more miserable, but they have never seen youse together, how he validates your art, your body, your sexuality. You would do anything for him, including wait.

This is called “insecure attachment.”

The verb that best describes your course of action is “settle.” You settle for less. Subject; verb; adverbial prepositional phrase, the diminished condition under which you, a non-smoker, propose most coffee breaks and swallow secondhand on the one out of every four or five invitations he accepts. You settle into a routine. Another subject; verb; adverbial prepositional phrase that describes littering your chats with innuendos that would make a 12-year-old boy proud or a girl cool, cool enough to promote to girlfriend. As less becomes your routine, your sleep becomes unsettled. Introductory adverbial clause that establishes an antecedent condition—the less that is your new normal—before you, the subject, can engage in the action of fucking yourself, sighing his name into your pillow instead of his shoulder or clavicle.

4. Climax

You finger the viscose options on the sale rack with the same nimbleness with which you type out ledes and nut grafs on your junior reporter salary. Most Washington newsrooms buy at least one table at the White House Correspondents Dinner and distribute the seats to their reporters in a popularity contest befitting the name “Nerd Prom.” You’d attended the dinner as a 21-year-old Capitol Hill Bureau intern watching George W. Bush folksy at the podium and posing for a picture with another war criminal, Henry Kissinger, who bled gravy from a stain the size of a sniper wound over his tuxedoed chest.

Back when you respected the office, if not the office holder, the most high-profile celebrity to attend the dinner was a Desperate Housewife. The inauguration of hope and change brings the A-list to Washington. You must be doing something right at work, because your name is on the list.

The guappu’s, too.

This will be the night.

Three afternoons before the dinner, youse escalate the cybersex. You tell him you don’t want to cross his boundaries, but he teases out a fantasy from your “vagenda,” which he likens to a Jedi Knight.

Can youse speak this way and return to “normal”? he asks.

“I don’t know what you think ‘normal’ is, but having an open dialogue is normal, I think.” Better than pretending he isn’t interested in your vagenda.

“I am.”

“So I want to know what you’ve been doing to me lately. It’s only fair for you to share, if I did.”

He takes a 10-minute break to file his story or jerk off in the bathroom—you can’t be sure.

Before he proceeds with the latest round of filth, he lays down a marker. You do “things,” the extent of which he hasn’t even told you, to him. (Subject; verb; direct object; appositive phrase describing the types of “things;” direct object who receives the “things.”)

Youse share an “intense physical, chemical connection.” He’s kidding himself whenever he thinks he’s got his physical attraction under control.

He’s never been this direct, even that time he fantasized about sliding his cock into you (“slow, then fast”).

“You thought of all of that when we were talking about fucking cultural stuff? Like how to write the word ‘mozzarella’ in a story?” you ask.

“I can multi-task.”

This is more than sex. The sex, however, is going to be spectacular. You can’t wait for the Correspondents Dinner.

This is going to be the night.

You find a red gown at the new Nordstrom Rack in Arlington, across the street from the Ritz Carlton where Linda Tripp entrapped Monica Lewinsky more than a decade earlier. Some of your friends say that oral sex is more intimate. But penetration is harder to swallow for the good Catholic girl you’re trying and failing to leave behind. It’s always been easier for you to take the whole of a man who won’t commit into your mouth.

An “aurora borealis,” the guappu called his fantasy of fucking you. You don’t think you’ll be able to survive the expectations if there’s no guarantee he’ll be inside you again.

Tonight youse will finally fuck.

You meet him outside the Washington or “Hinckley” Hilton, if you’re talking to a local who remembers where they were when Reagan was shot. He’s in a tuxedo and you can’t take your eyes off him. You’ve only seen him without his glasses when you took each other’s off in your bed. You want to kiss each eyelid.

Unfortunately, he’s with his guest for the evening. By her body language, she wants to be more than his garden-variety source. Va fongool, lady. You got to him first. You vow to be there when the night ends.

President Obama makes a punchline about real estate mogul and “The Apprentice” star Donald Trump, a B-list celebrity in an A-list crowd. You don’t pay attention to Scarlett Johansson sitting in Sean Penn’s lap, or try to get a picture with Bradley Cooper. It’s the best night of your life because you’re sitting next to the guappu. He seems intimidated by the celebrities.

He keeps texting under the table.

After so many years in these kinds of rooms, you feel like you belong. Maybe you can be his teacher, too.

That’s how you find yourself at the after-hours bar, out-drinking his source until she leaves. Alone, together, for the first time all night, youse head outside the Hilton. He lights a cigarette. He looks at you in your bright red dress, you pretty little thing, you silly little girl, you four-eyed wallflower.

You doe-eyed, hare-brained bitch.

“I’m getting back together with my fiancée.”

He might as well be speaking in an indecipherable, ancestral dialect.

You are a journalist. You have questions.

No, they have not been intimate.

“Do you love her?”

Silence.

“Come home with me,” you beg, beg, beg him. Is it coercion when the power balance is this fucked? Is relent consent? None of these concepts are in your vocabulary. You take a cab back to your studio apartment. Youse kiss.

Fight.

One of youse unzips your dress.

Kiss.

Fight.

You’re unwilling to have him touch your best Victoria’s Secret bra and thong set, which you’d been saving for him.

He never asked you to wait. He told you not to wait.

If he leaves, you tell him, this is it. This is your boundary. You are no one’s gumara. That he never asks you to be his gumara is its own kind of pain. He shuts the door.

5. Resolution

An effective narrative arc that climaxes—metaphorically—at the White House Correspondents dinner should chop chop with the falling action and reconvene its narrative threads for a stunning conclusion.

Your daily routine hasn’t changed much in the two weeks since the dinner. You cry yourself to sleep. You fuck yourself awake. You hide from him in the Capitol. Only your editor can force your return to the office.

The guappu checks in once, overflowing your chat box with smiley face emojis. He’s flirting with you. The fuck. You want to talk, really talk, but you need more time. It’s the end of the semester, anyway. You finish your godforsaken guidonovella essay and you can’t even workshop it. He’d be madder at you than that night at the pizzeria. You’re no rat.

If there’s anything you keep harder than his secrets, it’s your promises.

You swear your friend Audra, the writing program’s second best writer, to off the record feedback over drinks at a bar.

The whiskey: neat.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’s married.”

No, no. No, no, no, no, no. “Engaged.”

“Married.”

Engaged to be—

“Married.”

No, no. No, no, no, no, no, he says in a series of text messages with uncharacteristically bad grammar: “i have never deceived u.” He didn’t have the heart to tell classmates that bought him items off his registry, which you had long since found online. “I’ve since returned those gifts by the way…”

He calls. He is furious.

“What do you want from me?”

“I just want to know you’re not married.”

No, he says again.

You want to believe in the happy endings only a real writer could give youse. But you remain a reporter by trade. You type his name, her name, and their wedding date into the search bar.

Her name is the password for their wedding album. Hundreds and hundreds of photos of your tuxedoed Nerd Prom King, marrying someone who isn’t you.

When morning comes, you send him the link.

He conflated the life stories he told your mutual colleagues at work, where he was allegedly engaged one day, single the next, and various classmates at school.

There was never a “youse.” Writing isn’t sex. His constant revision is edging at best.

You sit through two hours of excuses on a bench outside the Capitol. He and his fiancée—wife—had broken up, but they thought she was pregnant. (So they were intimate.) They thought he had cancer. (Multiple therapists will go on to say “cancer” is a common lie.) They’d rescheduled their cancellation so close to the date, he had to borrow his uncle’s wedding ring.

You don’t question her faithfulness. There is no way that girl from MySpace is a cheater.

At least one of you cried. You and he held hands at one point.

“Have you told her about me?” you ask.

Did he reply no, or not yet?

You don’t think he should start his marriage with a lie. But you still love him too much to rat him out to his wife.

And then there’s one more line you can quote.

“I know you wouldn’t tell her because that’s not the kind of person you are,” he says.

The guappu’s words flatter what remains of your broken heart. You won’t learn the concept of “gaslighting” until he appears to lie to the entire newsroom about his father’s death (the Googled obituary commemorates a different relative’s life), raising the possibility that his father was never actually sick, nor the word until after Donald Trump’s first term in office, when rioters break into the building outside which you sit, then rebrand it as patriotism.

“Glad you are a sneaky reporter,” Audra says. But you don’t want to be sneaky, let alone a reporter. You wanted to make art, and love. What kind of writer can you be without him?

You start to build the syllabus. You feel seen in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, the story of a friendship as much as the story of a striver who believes she’s less than the neighborhood boy she loves. You find strength in Natalia Ginzburg, the Italian Jewish feminist author, and Silvia Federici’s “wages for housework.” Italo-Cuban Alba de Cespedes’ Quaderno Proibito—Forbidden Notebook—should be assigned to new mothers along with state-supported childcare. Jennifer Guglielmo’s books on racism in the Italian American community will help you confront your own that lingered over the course of a life.

Dr. Cynthia Greenlee and Dorothy Roberts, among the Black stewards of the reproductive justice movement, transform your writing and reporting when you change beats in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Abortion access and autonomy for all bodies, cis and trans, will become your life’s work. Your commitment to publishing personal essays grows in tandem with what you learn. You have much to say of substance. You don’t always need to quote others.

You will have to own your own craft. You have to decide what you want to leave behind. Daughter, or changeling. Gumara, or goo-mad. Clips, or essays, features, narratives. Marble, or granite.

Whenever you visited your grandfather’s shop in your “little” days, you climbed into the sling he used for 1,000-pound granite blocks. He lifted you up, up, up, St. John’s Cemetery in the distance. Surrounded by dead darlings, your character did not depend on reading Faulkner.