Writing fiction doesn't pay much, and you give up a lot when you try to be a writer. Money, the things other people have, even family—you can pretty much kiss all that goodbye. But there are compensations. Your life's maybe not as wide as most people's, but it's deeper, and sometimes it's more interesting. You're always trying to explain and describe things to yourself, and so you see things other people miss and feel things most people are too busy to bother with.

I know, because when this story takes place, I was living in an unconverted loft in a seedy part of the city, right smack up against the L tracks. So close that I could stand at my window in my underwear and stare eye to eye with the people riding to work in the morning and coming home at night, and I could see their eyes didn't go very deep. I was writing mostly porn at the time, and I knew they were reading it, but you couldn't tell from their eyes.

I was also teaching a survey course poetry at Crane Community College to pay the bills, and that's where I met Emma. It was a summer session, a small class of maybe 20 students in a funny kind of miniature lecture hall, a semester's worth of work crammed into six weeks, and I was just there as temporary help—an adjunct instructor—because none of the real faculty wanted to waste their summers teaching kids who were just trying to blow their way through a survey course. Emma was a returning student in her mid- twenties. She'd dropped out of her regular four-year college for whatever reason before graduating, had done whatever she'd dropped out for for a few years, changed her mind and now worked in an office during the day and took courses at night to finish her degree.

I liked returning students. They know why they're in college and they take it seriously. They've also been out in the real world long enough that they come into the classroom with some real questions, but they're still naïve enough to think that they'll get some real answers.

Still, I never expected to connect with Emma. She seemed a bit too vain, a bit too good-looking and fashionable to have any intellectual ambitions, and her glowing tan didn't inspire a lot of confidence in her academic dedication. She was tall, very nicely built, with a lush and sumptuous woman's body—long brown hair and brown eyes, and she always dressed well. She took care of herself. She looked like a girl whose main interest was men, and who knew her own worth and thought pretty highly of herself. I had her pegged for an upper middle-management husband in a year or two, two kids and a McMansion, and incipient alcoholism starting about age 40 when she learned about her husband's affair.

That is to say, she seemed like a perfectly normal suburban girl to me. In light of what happened between us, that's important to keep in mind. She wasn't a freak, or a loser or a geek, or neurotic in any meaningful way, and in fact the work she turned in was very good. She knew how to use semicolons, which is a rarity these days bordering upon the freakish. She was a very smart girl and could have coasted through the class but she really wasn't interested in being smart and apparently had never found much use for it. What she was was something else that I still don't know how to define. Sensual? Sexual? Feminine? Submissive? Obsessed?