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CAVEH

Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been obsessed with finding a romantic partner. I believe that the purpose of life is to join with others and my main goal in life has always been to find a life partner. Unfortunately, this quest has proven elusive and I have been divorced three times. After my last divorce, at the age of fifty-seven, I found myself dating mostly twentysomethings, not because I was especially drawn to twentysomethings but because they were the only ones who seemed drawn to me. My last several girlfriends all approached me as fans after a film screening or messaged me on Instagram. They’ve been the only ones who have seemed interested.

ADELAIDE

I hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight and a half years. In all that time I’d only had two dates. They were both with the same person, but they were a girl on the first date and a boy on the second. I found that interesting, but nothing else about them. On the first date they told me they liked to wear odd socks. Between dates they sent me a selfie with a sock on each ear. I don’t know why I agreed to the second date. It was something to do, and maybe I wanted to experience not being the needy one for once. Maybe I thought I’d enjoy acting cold, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was easy to get rid of them in the end. I told them I didn’t believe in romance. “I don’t think anybody really loves anybody,” I said toward the end of the second date. “They just pretend they do to secure backup. They want someone on their side in case they’re struck down by misfortune.” I believed that was true at the time.

CAVEH

After my breakup with Kathy, who had been twenty-four when I met her and twenty-seven when we broke up, I was lonely and single again. I was more famous than I’d ever been, so getting laid was a little easier than it used to be, but not by much. After a few demoralizing one-night stands, I met Kate, who was also twenty-seven. She emailed me asking if I could teach her how to appreciate poetry. I googled her. She was cute. So I offered to meet her over Zoom and read through a poem together. My main motivation was romantic. But I wanted to meet over Zoom because I was worried that (1) she might be crazy (I attract a lot of them), or (2) that I was projecting my own desires onto her. But I enjoy close readings of poems, so I figured the worst that could happen was that I deepen my knowledge of poetry.

ADELAIDE

It was hard to find anyone I was interested in. My capacity for being interested in someone had been absorbed by my therapist for so many years, and this had been all projection. Since I wasn’t able to get to know her, she couldn’t fall short of my ideal. Whenever I told a friend I’d been single for eight years they acted like I must be mistaken. It seemed an impossibility to them, just unthinkable. But what did they mean? Was there some specific practical thing they would have done that I hadn’t, which would have prevented my being single? Or did they think interesting people had been appearing right under my nose but I’d refused to really see them? Nobody had interested me in all those years. I’m sure my friends could easily imagine experiencing one single day of not meeting anyone they wanted to date, so why not three thousand consecutive days? That’s what had happened to me.

CAVEH

Kate suggested we read a poem by Sylvia Plath. I don’t know her work very well, just the two famous ones—“Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” both of which I had memorized when I was in college. But the poem she chose, “Berck-Plage,” was difficult to make sense of, and we only made it halfway through the poem by the time I had to leave for my next meeting. But I enjoyed the experience of analyzing that poem, and she seemed not-crazy, so I suggested we schedule another Zoom session to finish the poem. She said she would love to.

ADELAIDE

Last May, I flew to New York. I wanted to see my book in bookshops in America, where it had a better cover. In Tribeca, enjoying myself for the first time in a really long time, eating at the restaurant from the cover of Bright Lights, Big City, I looked up what was on at the Roxy, the cinema down the road. The Trees Were Spelling Love Backwards was showing that evening, a film by Caveh Zahedi.

CAVEH

A few days later, I texted Kate to say that I would be open to doing our next session in person if she would prefer that and she said that yes, she would. I then offered to have dinner together beforehand and she said that would be great. I suggested my place and said I could make dinner. Again, she said great. This was all promising in terms of her potential romantic interest, but there was still enough plausible deniability that I couldn’t be sure.

ADELAIDE

I felt interested. I knew his name; I’d been coming across his name for ten or twenty years now, and each time I heard it I felt my interest grow. The growth didn’t feel like it was happening on a human schedule—every week or every month—but on a timeline more suited to trees. Artists I respected would mention him in interviews as someone they respected. Each time I heard his name I noticed I felt confused, like I should know who he was but didn’t. And my interest was bound with this mysterious sense of defeat. It felt too late to know who he was in any genuine way, since I hadn’t known who he was from the beginning, hadn’t followed each of his steps as he took them like a real and genuine fan.

CAVEH

When Kate came over I asked her about her motivations in meeting me, and we had a long and honest talk. She said she wanted me to mentor her. I told her I was more interested in a romantic relationship. She said that while part of her felt some physical attraction, another part wasn’t sure, and couldn’t we just read poetry together? I said we could, but that I was looking for a romantic partner, and if she wasn’t interested, that was where most of my energy would inevitably go.

ADELAIDE

I went to the Roxy and watched the film. When Valerie, Caveh’s love interest in the film, suggested that Caveh wasn’t cool enough to fit in with her friends, I filled up with indignation. After the film, Caveh came on stage and sat on a red velvet chair. I took a photo. He seemed able to take questions endlessly; he seemed to see no need to stop taking questions from the audience. Now that I was finally seeing him, had finally seen one of his films, I saw I wasn’t too late to know who he was, as long as I was still living. That’s the thing about being human. All you have to do to make sure you’re not too late to do something is make sure your heart’s still pumping, make sure you’re still alive. For the most part that’s done with no conscious effort at all: an electrical impulse is generated by the sinoatrial node, your heart beats, it’s automatic … Autonomic, that’s the right word.

CAVEH

Kate and I got stoned and she ended up spending the night. We started seeing each other. But she still had mixed feelings. She said she really wanted to have a kid, and given our age difference she didn’t think I was the ideal choice to father her children. I could see her point, but argued that there was no reason not to continue to see each other until such a time as when she met someone she thought would make a better life partner. She seemed convinced by this argument—as long as we were in an open relationship, which I was perfectly fine with.

ADELAIDE

In the airport on my way home, I ordered Caveh’s book of collected writings and then followed his Instagram page. Just a few days later there was a new Instagram post: an upcoming screening, on a boat, of his work in progress, Ulysses and I. And the boat would be docked in London, not in New York! I wanted to go, and because I wanted to try to speak to him afterward, I invited Alice. Out of all of my friends, she had always been best at egging me on.

CAVEH

And then I took my twelve-year-old daughter to London to see some musicals. We saw Matilda, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Evita. To help pay for this extravagantly expensive trip, I decided to organize a work-in-progress screening of my Ulysses film while I was in town. It was at a place called Theatership, where I had done a live podcast event a few months earlier. I had taken a liking to the age-appropriate proprietress and was wondering if she might be a more viable romantic partner. Things with Kate had been less than optimal recently, and I was worried that we weren’t unequivocally sexually compatible.

ADELAIDE

Waiting on the docks, drinking a Coke, I saw him walk past and go aboard the boat. Alice didn’t notice, but I noticed. I looked over, and when he briefly caught my eye I felt a mild terror. Belowdecks it was hot. There was only one giant fan, and Caveh sat his daughter in front of it. I’d brought a copy of my book to give him and tried to fan myself with it, but it was still only out in hardback, and it’s completely impossible to fan yourself with a hardback book, I discovered that day. When the screening was over I waited for all the fans waiting to talk to him to finish talking to him. I wanted to be last, to be the special one.

CAVEH

When the film ended, the usual very sparse throng of well-wishers waited to speak to me. One of them was a British woman who impressed me immediately with a certain touching vulnerability in her manner. She told me she had been inspired by my film to finally read Ulysses. She asked if I had any advice on how best to go about that, and I told her it was complicated but that if she emailed me I would be happy to steer her in the right direction. She then asked if she could give me a copy of the book she’d written, and I said of course. I wasn’t expecting much. I was just trying to be polite.

ADELAIDE

When it was time, I approached him at the ship’s bar and reached in my bag for my book. I thought he might worry I was going to bring out some kind of weapon, but he didn’t look worried at all. The book seemed to impress him. A completed novel would probably impress most people, as long as it wasn’t self-published. After we’d confirmed that I had written the book and that he knew the clown on the cover was Pierrot and that we both loved the Pierrot character in Children of Paradise, we started to talk about Ulysses. I told him I hadn’t read it, despite having a copy on my shelf for years. He said this was probably true of a lot of people. I asked if he could start a Ulysses reading group. He said though he’d love to, he didn’t have the time. So I asked if he could help me to read it, just me, just by giving advice.

CAVEH

I was taken with her right away, and tempted by her suggestion that I start a Ulysses reading group just with her. I was hoping she would join us for dinner but she said she had to leave to catch the train back to Hastings. When I found out that Hastings was next to Brighton, I introduced her to Ralph, with whom I had done the live podcast event a few months earlier, because he lived in Brighton. He seemed underwhelmed by what struck me as an extraordinary coincidence and was polite but reserved. I was definitely attracted to her, even more than to the age-appropriate proprietress. I hoped she would write to me, but when she said goodbye and left, I assumed I would never see her again.

ADELAIDE

I’m recounting this exchange like it was smooth, like I found talking to him easy, but it wasn’t, and I didn’t. I’d kicked myself for not thinking to take beta blockers twenty minutes before. I was shaking, I stuttered, every now and then I blushed. I told him I was relieved to have published a novel before I was fifty, since this had been my goal. I was turning fifty in just a couple of days. Caveh said, “Five-oh?” to confirm I meant fifty, but what else could I have meant? I couldn’t have meant fifteen. Walking back to the tube with Alice, my excitement levels were high, a level I really liked. I thought: He smiled a little, but not as much as most people smiled. He laughed, but not in the places I’d expected. He finished his words very carefully; everything he said seemed important. He didn’t seem fake at all.

CAVEH

The next day I got a long and very touching email. She told me that she was turning fifty the next day and said, “I wanted to do one other thing, other than write a novel, before I was fifty, and I didn’t get to do it.” That phrase haunted me. What could the other thing be? Was it something sexual? Was that why she wasn’t just coming out and saying what it was?

ADELAIDE

I only waited one day to email him. The subject of my email was “Please help me read Ulysses,” but that wasn’t the main thing I wanted from Caveh. I told him I liked what he said on the Ion Pack podcast, that while success strokes your ego, failure brings you closer to God. I told him it reminded me of something my favorite author, Sheila Heti, wrote: “Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant-garde of the modern age.” I said it was nice that we both had daughters the same age. Then I told him I was scared to be arriving at fifty, in just one day’s time. I’d wanted to do one other thing, other than write a novel, before reaching this age, but that thing I hadn’t achieved.

 

CAVEH: What was the other thing you wanted to do before you turned fifty?

ADELAIDE: I wanted to find a nice man that would be happy doing certain things but not others: lots of kissing, lots of blowjobs one way, and lots of hands both ways, but nothing else. But I think that’s impossible for men.

CAVEH: I’m not sure I agree with you about that being impossible for men. It’s an arrangement that I, for one, would be quite open to.

ADELAIDE: Really, you wouldn’t be like, And now let’s get to the main course?

CAVEH: For some people, that is the main course.

ADELAIDE: OMG.

CAVEH

I found what she was saying very arousing. This sounded great to me. Ideal, even. I felt we were weirdly not only sexually compatible but a perfect fit. Like we were made to be together. I got very excited not only at the thought of having sex with her but at the thought that we were somehow supposed to be together. It wasn’t just sexual or even romantic. It felt somehow metaphysical. Like it had been ordained by God.

ADELAIDE

He offered to do a Zoom for my fiftieth birthday, to read the book together. By “the book” I assumed he meant my book; I kept forgetting about Ulysses. On screen, he was in a fancy hotel bathroom. He looked so good I secretly took a few screenshots, creeping my fingers to the three correct keys whilst keeping my eyes on the screen. As well as himself, Caveh looked like the crime writer James Ellroy, my teenage boyfriend Nick, and my Old Icelandic tutor. These had been three of my most powerful crushes. He’d told me in his first email that he had a girlfriend, so he wasn’t sure how to proceed—“how best to thread this needle”—but I already felt in love. Who would take an hour out of their day to give someone they’d just met a Ulysses lesson, for free? He was a busy man from New York with millions of projects and a twelve-year-old daughter in tow.

CAVEH

And then we had a Zoom meeting to read the first page of Ulysses together. I tried to keep it as businesslike and professorial as I could, partly out of fear and shyness and partly because of Kate, even though we were in an open relationship. But that openness had never been tested, so I was worried about how Kate would react to my rapidly developing feelings for Adelaide.

ADELAIDE

We chatted before making a start. He asked if the father of my child was still in the picture. He checked that I didn’t like penetration during sex. I couldn’t believe my ears when he said that word; I could never say that word, in any context, ever. I sat on my feet on the sofa and rocked from side to side. I hadn’t realized that being spoken to by a man in a hotel bathroom—so openly, over Zoom, in preparation for a Joyce lesson—had been an option, or something I would enjoy so much. We started reading Ulysses, alternating sentences. Every time he asked if I understood a reference, I didn’t. I only knew what “untonsured” meant, since I’d been researching Saint Francis of Assisi. I was actually enjoying my birthday. I honestly couldn’t believe it.

CAVEH

Right after our Zoom call I left for the States, even though what my heart wanted was to see Adelaide as soon as possible. I started fantasizing about what being with her would be like. I started imagining kissing her and touching her and having the kind of sex she was suggesting. I was starting to obsess, and I could feel that I was becoming salvational about this relationship. It seemed to promise an end to all my problems.

ADELAIDE

I thought about his face and his voice for the rest of my birthday. I emailed him that I hoped to get to do those things with him, even just one time. Maybe if we did it just one time it wouldn’t hurt his girlfriend too much, but would make me feel taken care of for the rest of my life. I couldn’t tell how I felt about his girlfriend. I was trying not to think about her. They were in an open relationship, something I couldn’t comprehend, and she was twenty-seven.

CAVEH

That summer, I had been invited to show my films in Belgium, Macedonia, and Kosovo, and the thought of going alone to all those places struck me as potentially depressing. So I had invited Kate to come along, and she had already bought plane tickets. She had also finally told her mom about us, which was a big deal for her. She had been worried her mom would be horrified by our age gap, but she didn’t seem to be, and Kate was both hopeful and relieved the next time I saw her. Which was when I told her about Adelaide.

ADELAIDE

We switched to talking on WhatsApp. I talked about Sheila Heti and the Cure; he talked about John Ashbery and A Course in Miracles. I told him how much I used to like the scene in Cape Fear where Juliette Lewis sucks Robert De Niro’s thumb. I told him how much I’d always liked his scene in Waking Life. He told me I reminded him of the Emily Watson character in Breaking the Waves. We sent each other photos of ourselves reading the other person’s book. The feelings of love coming up when I thought about him started to get overwhelming. It felt like my life had started its heaven episode—some coincidence that I’d just started praying this year.

CAVEH

Kate was bummed. She had just bought expensive plane tickets to travel together in Europe and now I was telling her I was having feelings for another woman, someone closer to me in age. She was tempted to cancel the trip, but the tickets were nonrefundable, and there was a guy in Europe she’d always had a crush on whom she kind of wanted to see—so we decided to go on the trip together as planned. But the whole time we were in Europe all I could think about was Adelaide, and I couldn’t help wishing I was with Adelaide instead of Kate. I considered asking Adelaide to come to Belgium, but she had already offered to come to New York, and all of my Adelaide sexual fantasies revolved around her showing up to my apartment. In short, I didn’t want to have to give those fantasies up. So I chose to delay our seeing each other so that the circumstances could better conform to my fantasies.

ADELAIDE

Caveh said my book was making him more attracted to me. He was alternating each chapter with a chapter of Les Misérables. One time he messaged me: “I was just reading the part in your book where you say ‘I think sometimes I just want to be with another person. But like how it is in a novel or a play, where nobody is afraid to say what they want …’ I want that too.” That’s when I told him I felt like I loved him. He replied that he felt like he loved me too. A couple of WhatsApp messages later we moved from saying we felt like we loved each other to saying we loved each other. We both knew this was absurd; we’d barely spent ten minutes together! Caveh thought there was evidence on both sides that we were love addicts but said that was fine by him.

CAVEH

I was calling Adelaide on the phone from Macedonia and Kosovo, and Kate wasn’t loving that. At one point, she asked me to stop talking to Adelaide while we were in Europe together. Adelaide didn’t love that and neither did I, but I was trying to find a way to continue to see both women, and I was willing to forego talking to Adelaide for a few more days since I knew we would be seeing each other very soon. But then Kate suggested that maybe she should talk to Adelaide on the phone, just to normalize things.

ADELAIDE

One time, his girlfriend asked if we could speak on the phone, and I said, Yes, I guess. She sounded sweet, like a friend I’d had in my twenties, and when we said goodbye, I said, Message me any time. She told Caveh afterward that she thought we were much too different. I said, Who’s too different, me and her? Caveh said no, and I said, Oh, she meant you and her! And Caveh said no. She had meant me and him—me and Caveh. I felt like I’d never heard anyone say anything so insane in my whole life, such terrible misjudgment. I decided I never wanted to speak to her ever again.

CAVEH

Kate’s conversation with Adelaide went okay, but when I told Adelaide what Kate had said about her afterward she took it badly. Our remaining days in Kosovo felt like an eternity. Adelaide seemed to want to be with me in a way that few women had. Her enthusiasm and commitment were contagious and a little intoxicating. Meanwhile, Kate and I started fighting more and more.

ADELAIDE

One friend told me it would never work out because he liked girls in their twenties. One friend said, Be careful, he uses his girlfriends for art. Sheila Heti had just finished the third season of The Show About the Show. She said, You don’t want to end up one of those girls crying on camera. I watched to the end of the third season too, but it didn’t make me scared; it only made me love him more. I started worrying about how unworried I was. But only for a second. My heart knew what was going on; it could easily sense his goodness. Other people were just using their brains.

CAVEH

I was trying to help Kate find a new boyfriend and encouraged her to reach out to the guy she had a crush on who had visited us in Belgium. I also encouraged her to pursue a British filmmaker at the festival who seemed drawn to her. At one point, she threatened to spend the night with the good-looking young waiter at the pizza place we were eating at. I did not like this idea, even though I was carrying on an epistolary romance with Adelaide at the time.

ADELAIDE

We sent each other voice notes. The sound of his voice made me crazed every time. On holiday with my daughter in Berlin, I left her on the phone to her dad in our hotel room when Caveh had a five-minute window away from work and away from his girlfriend. When he called me I had to lean against a barbershop to keep from falling down. I think I started drooling. I wish God had recorded a video of that very special moment and would let me watch it back.

CAVEH

Kate was having heavy period bleeding and one morning the sheets were covered in blood. I was worried that the hotel would charge us for the sheets, so I snuck into the laundry room late at night to get new sheets and discreetly get rid of the old ones. What I didn’t know was that there was a security camera recording everything that happened, and I was chewed out the next day for breaking into the laundry room after hours. The situation with the hotel staff remained strained until we both got sick and an ambulance had to be called. I think they felt sorry for me after that. I think they thought that the old man with the young girlfriend was dying and that they should be a little nicer to me.

ADELAIDE

I hadn’t completely forgotten about my plan to read Ulysses, though I’d not progressed one page since my birthday. I had the idea of motivating myself by earning tokens each time I completed a chapter. The tokens would allow me to do the thing I wanted to do with Caveh. One hundred tokens could be worth ten blowjobs, something like that. The world isn’t fair anyway; logic doesn’t rule, so why not make my own logic, implement my own cause and effect, and dole out rewards to myself? And possessing lots of these tokens might help me stop worrying that I would only get to do that thing with Caveh one time, which had started to seem not enough. I suggested it to Caveh.

 

CAVEH: I love your token idea.

ADELAIDE: I’m glad you don’t think it’s moronic.

CAVEH: I think it’s brilliant.
And fun and exciting and odd in just the way I love.
And perverted in just the way I love.
Also, I want to see you as much and as long and as often as possible.

ADELAIDE: OMG, it’s like entering heaven talking to you.

CAVEH: I feel the same way.

ADELAIDE: Heart emoji.

 

CAVEH

Around this time, Adelaide said she had an idea she was contemplating. I asked her what the idea was, and she sent me a picture of her knuckles with my name written on them with a pen. She said she was thinking of having my name tattooed on her knuckles and asked how I would feel about that. I didn’t know what to feel. Part of me was touched and flattered and part of me was alarmed. Is she crazy? Is that a crazy thing to do?

ADELAIDE

We tried to find a plan of action to deal with all the love. He couldn’t hurt his girlfriend. I couldn’t leave my daughter. But when it was okay to briefly leave my daughter, when she had a week booked in with her dad, I flew to New York to see Caveh. Caveh’s girlfriend wasn’t crazy about the idea, but she understood and accepted it, he told me.

CAVEH

One fantasy I had involved something along the lines of opening the door to my apartment in the dark and immediately having the kind of sex we had talked about for weeks, right then and there against the door. Another involved guiding her to the bedroom in the dark with my hands on her hips. But when the moment came, it felt weird and creepy to open the door with the lights off, so I left them on. We hugged, a little awkwardly—or maybe it was just me who felt awkward. I didn’t know how long to hold her and I think I let go fairly quickly. It wasn’t quite as electric as the coming-together moment I’d imagined for weeks, and I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s melancholy line about a woman’s breasts, that they offer “promise of pneumatic bliss.”

ADELAIDE

I went straight to my hotel in New York, took a video of myself in the hotel mirror to make sure I looked like a person, then booked an Uber to his address. I did look like a person, a female one, and probably one younger than fifty. When he opened the door of course he was a person in real time, not an idea behind a WhatsApp message. It was just like his film that I’d seen at the Roxy. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing that he’d thought when he first met Valerie—that I was taller and weirder in real life. I wanted to hug him for a long time without speaking, stop for a second to look at his face and remember who he was, then go back to hugging him. I could have done that for hours. I wanted to be in the light and standing up. But Caveh stepped back soon after the first hug started. He suggested we go to bed, and so we were prone in the dark.

CAVEH

The sex that night confirmed for me that we were in fact unequivocally compatible and that I hadn’t been delusional this whole time.

ADELAIDE

Later that night he talked about how inevitable it was that we’d have to deal with disappointment—that it wasn’t immediately salvational to be together, that it didn’t feel like electricity to be next to each other and touch. Our emails had been so exalted that they’d created that expectation. I was used to fantasy relationships, ones in my mind that I could control, keep pure and perfect, so my personality wasn’t helping. I found it hard to let in real life.

CAVEH

I tried to describe to Adelaide my experience of our encounter not being salvational, but I think she took it to mean that I was disappointed, whereas I was just trying to acknowledge whatever part of projection had been at work so that we could connect even more deeply.

ADELAIDE

But when Caveh said that the real task in love—our real task, together, now—was to find a way to bring reality and the exalted place of our emails closer and find a real connection, I was sure I wanted to do it.

CAVEH

But it wasn’t until I did ketamine in her presence—she was too scared, so she wasn’t on it—that I got more honest and more open and more able to look unblinkingly into my own heart. I could let in how much I loved her and wanted to be with her and appreciated everything about her in a way that I have never experienced with anyone else before. It was as if the one thing I’ve wanted more than anything in life and that had eluded me for sixty-five years had finally arrived. I couldn’t believe it. I was in awe and felt that all the years of spiritual work I’d done were finally paying off and that I had, in some sense, earned this. That we must have both earned it.

ADELAIDE

I had booked a hotel for my whole stay just in case, but I felt so good with Caveh that I didn’t leave his apartment, except to get coffee every morning. The second night I stayed over, Caveh got stoned, and the third night he took ketamine. When he asked which drug I preferred him on I chose ketamine, because on the ketamine night the nice things he said to me were on another level, and he said he wanted to marry me.

CAVEH

That night I committed. I knew that there was something mystical happening and that God’s hand was in this. Her love was so steady and clear, so open-hearted and pure. When I met Sheila Heti in Toronto, before Adelaide came to New York but after we had started corresponding, Sheila said something along the lines of, “Adelaide’s the most pure person I’ve ever met,” and I remember thinking, She’s right. Pure is the right word. She’s incredibly pure.

ADELAIDE

It was hard leaving Caveh. I called him from JFK while waiting to board my flight, but he couldn’t talk. It was a bad time, he said, Kate had just come over. When my plane landed in England I turned off airplane mode, but no messages from Caveh came through on my phone. On the train home I messaged how much I missed him. He replied, “How was reentry?” I felt so sick seeing that message; it seemed so cold I was convinced it was over. I met my friend Catherine and cried, then I met my friend Alice and cried, then I collected my daughter from her dad’s, and, though I tried, I still couldn’t stop crying. I messaged Sheila. She asked her pendulum if Caveh really loved me, and the pendulum told her yes. He wanted to be with me long-term, the pendulum somehow said, but he felt abandoned when I left. Caveh messaged later that day and told me Kate had spent the night. Sometimes he said there was still “energy” between them; sometimes he said “things were moving in the right direction,” toward separation. It’s just that every time he told me he’d seen Kate I felt like I was being injected with poison. The poison felt cold, deadly, and destructive, and when it advanced up my arms, I felt like it might stop my heart.

CAVEH

The question was, What to do about Kate? I still had feelings for her, but not the kinds of feelings I was having for Adelaide. Part of me wanted to keep seeing them both, and Adelaide had said things that made me think she might be okay with that. But it quickly became clear that she really wasn’t, even if she wanted to be. So I promised her—and got Kate to agree—that Kate and I would stop having sex. But Kate was still spending the night, and even though we weren’t having sex, we were being physically affectionate, which made Adelaide horribly depressed. At a certain point I promised no more sleeping in the same bed, which Kate wasn’t happy about but accepted. But even talking to Kate or spending time with her would throw Adelaide into a tailspin, so I explained to Kate that I needed to prioritize my relationship with Adelaide and that I would no longer be available to hang out like we used to.

ADELAIDE

I felt pretty good when I was seventeen, learning about books and films and music in Nick’s bedroom. It’s only since then that I’ve been unhappy. So for about thirty-two years. A weird feeling of not being a person, of floating in a void, longing for the feeling of being in Nick’s bedroom again. I put Nick in my novel, and sometimes I wonder if he read it in heaven and was so pleased with how I portrayed him that he found Caveh for me to make me happy. He did this matchmaking from heaven so I could finally feel good again. Sometimes I really think that.

CAVEH

Adelaide told me that Sheila and her tattooist both cautioned her to wait a year before getting my name tattooed on her knuckles. And this made total sense to me. But then I thought there was also something beautiful about doing something when you want to do it and not waiting a year. In other words, the gesture is arguably more beautiful if done sooner rather than after a more cautious gestation period. And I didn’t like the idea of telling Adelaide what she should or shouldn’t do, so I told her she should do whatever she wanted. So she went ahead and got my name tattooed on her knuckles.

ADELAIDE

Whenever I heard Caveh’s name I always thought it sounded like the perfect name. It seemed like magic—his second name seemed to be doing a magic thing to his first. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. One time I wrote “loves” underneath his name and then wrote my name underneath that. I started calculating. I added up the number of Ls in both of our names, and then the number of Os, and then I added the Vs and the Es and the Ss. Then I did the sums I’d learned to do as a schoolgirl until I arrived at two digits. The two digits would be the percentage that Caveh Zahedi loves Adelaide Faith, and the percentage was ninety-six. Never in my lifetime of doing this procedure had I come to a percentage so high.

CAVEH

I have never been happier in my life. After Adelaide’s second visit to New York, she wrote, “I just had the happiest time of my life with you.” This made me elated. And after her third visit, she said something along the lines of “That was the happiest time of my life again.”

ADELAIDE

I’m not even having to use my tokens to do the things I want to do with Caveh. And anyway, we decided to read all of Joyce together, starting with Dubliners. We’re going to read out loud, alternating sentences, and it will take a really long time. I like thinking to myself, We’ll be together at least until we get to the end of Finnegans Wake.

CAVEH

I don’t know how much longer I have left to live, but I feel so relieved to think that I may not have to die alone, which is something I’ve always dreaded, especially whenever I’ve found myself involuntarily single. It’s hard being in a long-distance relationship—I yearn for her constantly and imagine her beside me when I go to sleep. But I’m mostly just incredibly grateful that I’ve found her, that loving her feels so natural, that I’ve never had better sex in my life, and that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are so much easier to bear with her beside me.

ADELAIDE

When Caveh had told his girlfriend that I was way more into him than she was, she’d replied, “Nobody loves anyone as much as Adelaide loves Caveh.” And that was the best thing she said.

 

Caveh Zahedi is an autobiographical filmmaker whose works include The Sheik and I, I Am a Sex Addict, In the Bathtub of the World, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, A Little Stiff, and the web series The Show About the Show. He is also the author of These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruin and What Rimbaud Said after the Amputation.  

Adelaide Faith’s debut novel is Happiness Forever, a fictionalized account of her yearslong obsession with her therapist. A fictionalized account of her obsession with her tattooist, “You Look Like a Good Girl,” was published online by Granta.