“You are the best wife anyone ever wanted. I can wait as long as it takes.”

“Yes, I will be better. But no, you cannot wait and see, so don’t make me love’s beggar. I am too proud.”

I felt worse after that, like a weak liar and coward and every mean, worthless thing there is. I did not leave her, though — not that night, or the next one, or the rest of the season.

The following month was September, and things had grown no better. Some days were up and some were volcanic, and I was due to return to New York to attend to my affairs and renew my visa.

“You will call when you arrive?” she asked. “Or you will let all of this fade into the past?”

“Do not say things like that.”

“As you wish. Since you are afraid and have doubt, I wish to let you go now, face to face.”

“We are still together.”

“Non. We were. Not anymore.”

“Of course we are.”

“Non, mon amour. Not anymore.”

“Don’t do this.”

“It is done. You wish to be the hero of the story, you tell yourself, but when people tell their own story it is so they can hide what kind of fool they are.”

“I’m a fool for you,” I said, letting the subject drop, and I returned to the hotel to pack.

When I returned the next morning to say goodbye before my flight, there was an ambulance picking its way down the hill. My heart sank, even before I reached her apartment, with fear of where it had come from. When I reached the top of the stairs, and opened her door, the apartment was empty and squalid. There was no answer when I called, and no note, and no music anywhere to be heard. I saw the neighbor in the hall, but he did not have to tell me anything.

She was a fine, beautiful girl. Luminous. Fragile. True. And she was my girl, and I was broken-spirited with grief to lose her, and our love that ignited all of a sudden to burn brighter than anything I ever knew. And I was hollow and sick with myself for how lowdown it was to give up on her like I did. Haunted every sunless day I crouched low around my own spirit, with no company but all the other ghosts behind my eyelids.

The film wrapped in early May and there was a cast party afterward in a club on East Broadway. The club was filled with beautiful people, who made media and fashion and nightlife, and knew, or thought they did, all there was to know about popular culture, and what people wanted, and how to give it to them. The air was clouded with weed smoke, which I never indulged in, but I took a hit from a joint passed to me by a beautiful girl, and had a sip of my cocktail, which I soon finished, and ordered another.

I wanted to abolish the past from my memory, and focus on what came next, which I could not fathom as I leaned against the bar, trying not to look too empty and centerless. Soon the festiveness and laughter washing through the room were enough to numb my worries, as the air began to buzz with electricity and an omnipresent desire — for sex, for money, for conquest — which the beautiful-looking people displayed in their gestures, in their clothes, in the ease of coded references laced through conversations that exuded confidence and spoke of belonging.

There were a smattering of famous faces scattered through the room, whom the regular people, the outsiders, watched surreptitiously. The famous people found each other, while the business people tried to circle next to the players, who manufactured and sold glory they themselves no longer believed in, as they but longed for something new they could hold to a while.

What was left for them was boredom, cynicism, self-deceit. They bullied, they schemed, they manipulated, they threw tantrums. They were broken narcissists who wished to be worshiped. Whatever the chink in anyone else’s armor, they looked for a way to exploit it. It was their value proposition. They thought like gangsters, and the only lasting value was survival itself. Whatever happened in the struggle for that, they kept moving forward and never mentioned those fallen by the wayside.

The rarest among them, who had reconciled how it was their world worked and who they themselves were, inhabited that apex of fear and insecurity and uncertainty, like gods walking through a dream. When they bullied and manipulated it was no longer for power or money but to serve some other, invisible truth they believed in absolutely. They were impressed by intelligence, talent, charisma, authenticity. If they could package those things up and sell them, so much the better. That was the game, but they had by then eyes on either side of their heads, one focused on the business at hand, the other turned inward to whatever kept them from losing themselves.

I watched the crowd schmooze, front, hustle, and ordered another cocktail, and took a hit from a blunt someone was nice enough to share as I waited, watching as the reality in the room bent with the force of raw ego and condensed desire in so small a space. My part in it was done. Everything belonged to the machine now, and I did my best to not worry about what came next, and simply enjoy the night.

Our party was upstairs on a balcony, affording us a clear view to the stage below, where last year’s pop superstar was making an unannounced appearance to test out the first single from his comeback album, which would be heard all around the world come summer. It was good and catchy the first time you heard it, and still hooked you the hundredth time. But by then you wanted the damn thing out of your head, which is why the machine was busy, even as they listened to it the first time, working up next year’s novelty the people did not yet know they wanted.

The tables at the foot of the stage were filled with business people from another party, still in their suits, and their lawyers, still in their ties, ordering bottle service; all wired on coke. They were powerful and connected enough to be in the club, but removed enough from the industry that they served as the first marks, who would start the buzz humming in the next circle out, until the energy from the room rippled across the country, like wavelets across a fishing pond. It would no longer be about the music by the next morning, but an economic reality of mass experience. To be in the club that night was to witness its magical transformation from private art to public culture. And, slip of time, its first step toward the reliquary of the past.

When the superstar left, the crowd was cresting with energy as the next performer, a midget Marilyn Monroe impersonator, took the stage. She did not imitate Marilyn exactly, but gave a pitch-perfect burlesque of the last golden idol to get her ticket punched that way. Unlike the ingénue she impersonated, she could actually sing. Raised-in-church-papa-was-a-traveling-preacher-mamma-used-to-cry-holy-all-the-damn-time-sing. When the black girls in the audience said That girl can sing, they didn’t qualify it with white girl.

She sang like there was something inside her she was on fire to tell, cutting clean through the derivative cunning, the manufactured desire, the Warholian wannabes before her, who had nothing to add but rode the latest trend until it ran out. Hers was a further station, and she knew it, as she tapped at the twin roots of desire and yearning. When I looked her up later there were no recordings from any of her performances, and when I reflected on it, that seemed right too. She sang like she had been here before, and it was the purity and depth she made you aware of in a single, exquisite moment that made you think maybe you had, too.

If she were four inches taller she would have been on every screen in the country. But who knows what the tradeoff would have been? She was not four inches taller, though, and did not get what came with that, but she had that voice. And she had that wanton, unbridled fire; and the people on the screens, and the people who decided what went on them, were watching her with awe and desire and joy that filled them completely and wanted for nothing else, as she made them know what they had come here for, if only for a vanishing moment.