I returned to a breezy, budding New York April.

I dragged my suitcases one at a time up the two flights of stairs and dropped them in the middle of the hovel I would now be sharing with not only Penny but also a director friend of ours named Sam. Penny and Sam had hooked up while I was gone and Sam had as good as moved in to our one-bedroom, bringing his waffle maker with him and little else. The two of them welcomed me back with a waffle dinner and a new cat they had found at the local bodega, whom they named Nada after the underground theater across the street, where Penny worked the box office.

I unpacked my designer clothes into my miniature closet with the paint peeling in tongues from the doorjamb. My only possessions until then had been a futon on the floor, a scavenged desk, and a bunch of clothes and records stacked in a wall unit fashioned from crates. Hippie tapestries were tacked over the windows as curtains. Dusty votive candles covered every available surface. A palace it was not. I put the rest of my jewelry, worth well over a hundred thousand dollars, in a shoebox in my closet. I wondered if rats were attracted to shiny things or if that was just magpies. Would the tenement rats, fat and self-assured, sneak in, gnaw their way through the cardboard, and make off with my Tiffany set?

I put the clothes that wouldn’t fit in the closet into two suitcases and later that week I took them with me in a cab to Jersey, figuring I could store them in the closet in my parents’ garage. I dumped the suitcases as I came in and even from the downstairs I could smell onions and roasting chicken. It was the first time I’d smelled any kind of food actually being cooked in months.

My mother called out from the kitchen to my father in the backyard, “Jill’s home!” As if I’d been away at camp; as if it was still my home.

I was coming up the stairs as she came down; we met in the middle with hugs and uneasy smiles. It didn’t seem to be getting any easier to hug her. It was always uncomfortable, like hugging a distant relative who had known you when you were a kid but whom you can’t remember at all. And this made me feel like shit, because my mother was a kind lady who cooked me chickens. I kept waiting for the discomfort to disappear as time passed, as I put more distance between my parents and me, but I hugged her and there it still was.

My father looked like he’d gained half his weight back already, and he vibrated with the same manic, distracted energy as ever. In his excitement to see me, he put me in a half headlock and rocked me back and forth. He’d been outside planting flowers and his shirt smelled like potting soil and grass.

Twenty minutes later I sat on the gray couch in the gray living room and looked out at their newly landscaped front yard through the gray stripes of the vertical blinds. They had asked me about the trip, of course, but had settled for my vague answers and had moved on to other things. I think they were relieved to let the subject drop.

“Did you move the fence in the front yard?” I asked.

“What fence in the front yard?” my mother responded.

“Wasn’t there a fence there before?”

“No,” said my mother.

How strange. I knew every corner of the house: every china pattern, every book spine in the study, every Hanukah-present hiding place, every piece of jewelry in my mother’s drawers, every bottle of liquor in the liquor cabinet. I knew where my father hid his small gun, an heirloom from his father. But I still remembered things wrong sometimes, weird things like a phantom fence in the yard. I felt like the girl who had lived in that house wasn’t me, but a person I’d read about in a story. A story I couldn’t quite recall.

“How long did you live here for, moron?” added my dad, though he said it affably. He was fond of using words like moron and schmuck in an affectionate way.

Weeks before I had been a beautiful femme fatale, sipping champagne and overlooking a foreign city and waiting for the Prince to return home from his princely duties. Now I was a moron, with a wicked zit growing on my chin and at least two hours left before I could make a polite exit and haul ass back to the city. I felt the migraine coming, as if someone had thrown a fishhook into my eye from behind and started to yank.

After dinner my mother, as always, brought out the gifts. She gave me a hand-knit beret from a crafts fair, a feminist-slogan T-shirt from her trip to Washington, D.C., with her women’s organization, and a jade necklace that had been my grandmother’s. I gave her the Cartier watch that wasn’t my favorite. I thought she’d get more use out of it than I would. I wanted to give her something nice.

“Why don’t you just throw it in the East River?” he said. “Quit that soul-sucking job. Stay here with us. Come on, let’s do it. Let’s go throw that thing in the river.”

Sam was a theater director, given to sweeping gestures.

“No way.”

Sweeping gestures were the same thing as getting mad and throwing a plate at the wall. Sweeping gestures felt dramatic and significant, but afterward you were left looking foolish because afterward nothing had changed. Things don’t explode and disappear; they explode and leave a mess all over the floor. There are always ceramic shards that escape the bristles of the broom and embed themselves in your bare feet for weeks afterward. The watch stayed.

Three weeks dissolved the way weeks will if you let New York have its way. I enjoyed my little life with Penny and Sam, reading the Times together in the morning while drinking espresso from the new machine I had bought. I wandered New York shopping and picking up the tab for lunches with friends.

When the date on my ticket rolled around, I called Ari and told her I needed to change it. I told her my father needed me there to care for him for a few more weeks. Truthfully, I couldn’t bear the thought of packing up and leaving again. I told myself I just needed a break, that I’d feel differently soon. I bought a pair of cowboy boots with real silver details. I bought a platform bed.

I was struck by mad inspiration. I decided that I was going to write a one-woman show based on my experiences in the sex industry. Not terribly original, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. By day, I sat in cafés and wrote my performance-art masterpiece. I bought a video camera. I bought a microwave oven.

After the theater closed for the night, Sam, Penny, and I would drink Baileys on our fire escape and talk about memes and the viral transmission of ideas. Across the country, Southern California was in flames with the Los Angeles riots. We talked about the impossibility of outright revolution given the brainwashing effects of consumerism. Revolution would have to happen with a collective shift of consciousness. If what we were doing didn’t in some way precipitate that shift, we deemed it worthless. Being home and among my real friends was such a relief. I could talk again. I could breathe again. Another three weeks passed this way and I pushed my departure date again as Ari’s voice grew impatient on the other end of the line.

I bought a pair of Chanel sunglasses that made me look like a fly. I bought a stun gun because you never know.

Yet another of the valuable skills I picked up in Brunei was the ability to get ready for almost any occasion in ten minutes. I had recently dyed my hair platinum blond and had discovered that blond privilege wasn’t an invention of my low self-esteem; it was a genuine fact. And though the bleach had burned my scalp and broke the ends of my hair clean off so I had to cut it into a bob, I was enjoying the extra attention. I was the Marilyn now. I styled it in pin curls in five minutes flat.

I was used to dressing for clubs frequented by drag queens, so I glued on false eyelashes and sported a bustier, knee-high platforms, and zebra leggings. But when we arrived, the scene was more about techno music and oversize pants. I felt out of place among the girls who slouched around Moby, starved vegans wearing pacifiers and funny hats.

Andy was an electronica composer, as well as a computer programmer—and he looked like one. He had long, stringy hair, terrible fucked-up teeth, and smart, blue-gray eyes. With his old classmate Tom, he had recently started a company called Tomandandy. Tomandandy had created a buzz. They had composed a popular dance hit. They had scored the exploding-head scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Andy was goofy and unassuming, but every time I got off the dance floor, he was waiting for me with a drink in his hand, the ensuing conversation hollered over the music with his lips occasionally brushing my ear. This, I thought, is why we like our music so loud at clubs. I couldn’t understand the words. His voice was part of the music itself.

“What?” I yelled.

And he leaned in again to repeat himself.

At the end of the night the crowded elevator, the one that made your ears pop as it whizzed downward from the one-hundredth floor, got stuck. It stopped quietly, without a lurch or a screech. It took us all a few minutes to figure out we weren’t moving. A woman in a yellow dress stood rigidly and stared at the unmoving numbers. Her boyfriend, who had too much gel in his hair, scratched his neck and shuffled his feet. One of the other guys began to argue with the over-gelled guy. As the minutes went by, the elevator started to smell like panic and sweat.

Andy and I were both calm. We sat down on the floor and talked, as if we were alone.

“Sam told me you just came back from Singapore.”

“Brunei. I was actually in a country called Brunei.”

“The Sultan of Brunei.”

“Exactly.”

I tried to describe my job in a truthful but not overly truthful way. I told him that I had been a royal guest, a couch decoration at nightly parties. I waited for the fallout but as far as I could tell there was none. He acted as if I was describing my job volunteering at the children’s hospital. He listened with interest, without judgment. This guy was unicorn rare, because all men react one way or another to the revelation that you’re a sex worker.

“If we were caught in this elevator for the next three days and the elevator-music channel was stuck, what would you want it to be playing?” I asked him, right before the cables came to life and the suspended box in which we sat resumed its journey down.

“Bruckner,” he said. “I would want to sit here with you and listen to Bruckner.”

He had one up on me because he had heard of the Sultan of Brunei, but I hadn’t heard of Bruckner. When we reached the bottom floor, we walked out into the night, spent and bonded by the fact that we had averted disaster. The financial district, emptied of its bankers and executives, looked like the proud ruins of a lost civilization.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

He took my hand, led me to a spot dead-center between the towers, and lay down on the ground without an explanation. I lay next to him. We looked up at the identical monoliths rising to touch the low night clouds, watched as they swayed slightly in the wind. I thought it was an optical illusion.

“No,” he said. “They’re actually moving. Architecturally a building is much stronger if it gives a little bit.”

Years later, I would remember that night. I would remember how New York had sparkled outside the wall of windows. How the whole city had seemed to breathe to the rhythm of the dance beat that throbbed through the club, which only hours before had been an elegant restaurant. How I had remembered sitting at that same restaurant with my parents when I was a little girl. We had gone for dinner there after the ballet one night. Maybe it had been Swan Lake.

And I would remember that while the other people in the elevator had begun to get agro and fight with each other, Andy and I had sat down in the midst of it and talked about Bruckner. As I watched the towers fall almost ten years later, I thought of the night I got stuck in the elevator of the World Trade Center. I thought of the night I met Andy.

When the elevator doors opened, the starved vegans from the other night reappeared, smoking and leaning on the window ledges along the corridor. The lights were out for some reason, something about replacing the wiring. The hipsters in the hallway were lit only by the street-lights outside and by the glowing cigarette cherries next to their faces. I walked past them to a cavernous room that reeked of fresh paint. Piled in the center of the room was a disjointed city of computer and music equipment that remained lit due to the presence of a noisy generator. Snarled piles of cords were everywhere.

In the corner of the room, washed in the blue of a computer screen, was Andy. He turned to me and smiled his wolf smile, his upper canines so crowded and pointy that it looked like he had a whole second set of teeth growing above the first ones. I knew that I was looking at a piece of my future.

As I moved around the darkened loft that night, drifting from one cluster of bored New Yorkers to another, I noticed a trend. I fell into conversation with a Brooklyn filmmaker and his Norwegian-model import girlfriend. The filmmaker said Andy was his best friend. I met a club promoter who said the same thing. So did a Unix programmer and so did practically everyone else I talked to. I would later discover that people often said Andy was their best friend when he barely knew their name, because Andy was the world’s greatest listener. He inspired an easy intimacy that compelled strangers at bars to tell him their secrets and often spawned rivalries for his attention. The people around Andy were close with him but antagonistic toward each other.

Andy and I snuck away from the party and went for a walk. We made out in a TriBeCa alley under a cupola of scaffolding. I recognized that Andy was a rare find. He was in need of a de-geeking makeover, but that was an easy fix. After a few more dates, I wedged myself into his life, becoming a regular installation at the studio and a source of untold drama between Andy and his business partner, Tom. I fit seamlessly into the pattern of everyone loving Andy and hating each other.

I was in love, real love with a real boyfriend. I thought about Robin often, but didn’t miss him at all. When the date on my ticket came around again, I didn’t show up at the airport. I didn’t call Ari to cancel. I threw the ticket in the trash and walked forward into my new life as if the old one had never existed.

But apartment hunting in New York was a horror that I didn’t feel like facing; I was characteristically impatient and took the first thing that came along. Our apartment was a one-bedroom comprising two minuscule white boxes, with an Easy-Bake-size kitchen along the wall of the living room.

I packed up and moved my entire room at Penny’s in about five hours. I gave Andy a makeover and a home and he paid our rent and gave me someone to love. We got a python. I bought us a bed, a dresser, and a couch at a cheap furniture store on Sixth Avenue. My parents came into the city to have lunch with me on weekends and my mother constantly restocked our freezer with lasagna and chicken soup. I reheated her food for our dinners and called it cooking. We were practically all grown up.

It was my fantasy in many ways, having this normal life but still being complete freaks. An arty hooker (or a hooker-y artist, depending on the day) and a genius computer hacker, taking over the world by day while enjoying quiet nights at home watching classic films and eating Chunky Monkey. On odd nights, when the stars aligned, this is what our life looked like. But truthfully, I spent many of those nights alone. Andy was a workaholic and was almost never home. I told myself that it was ideal because I was a girl who needed her space. Andy wasn’t the only one with a career. I had my own career to think about.

I went on auditions and went back to working at the Wooster Group a few hours a week. I filled notebooks with my scribbles of script ideas. Most afternoons I walked to Andy’s studio, sat on the long orange custom-made leather couch, and ate sushi while I watched Andy work, composing music on his elaborate computer console. He was so talented, so unassuming, so fucking smart. I envied him. He didn’t have to audition for anyone or fuck anyone or pretend to be something he wasn’t or kiss anyone’s ass or beg for a role, a job, a chance. He just had to be Andy. That’s what you get from the world for being exceptional. The rest of us have to work harder. If I were just me, just Jill, I’d be nowhere.

So it wasn’t my lack of a period that alerted me to something being wrong; I just knew. But I peed on the stick and it came up negative. I peed on sticks again and again and my doctor insisted the sticks didn’t lie. When I finally demanded a blood test, I was almost three months pregnant. Andy was strangely unfazed when I showed up at his work with the news of a pregnancy. He consoled me with a brief hug before going back to work, leaving me frozen in front of the orange elevator doors with the receptionist staring at me.

She and I must have had warring astrological signs or something, because our interactions were always bristly. She was the one who screened my calls when Andy didn’t want to be disturbed. He denied it, but I knew it was true. I stuffed any display of weakness or emotion and planned to have my feelings when I got somewhere private. But when I got home, I couldn’t find the feelings I’d put aside for later. That’s the danger of pretending. You can forget what you were pretending not to be in the first place.

“I’m not sure I want to get rid of it,” I said.

Andy generally complied with my wishes without protest. It was a good trick he had. He made people feel like they were in control, but actually he was getting them to take care of everything for him. Sure, I could decorate the place any way I wanted, but the catch was I had to do it all myself. That way when things went wrong, like with the couch, it was never Andy’s fault.

In this instance, however, I saw a side of Andy that I hadn’t before. He was quietly decided and direct. It seemed that he was capable of having an opinion after all. He may have had opinions all along and just hadn’t been letting on.

“If you want to have a baby,” he said, “you’ll be doing it alone.”

In high school, I had bussed down to Washington to march with pro-choice advocacy groups. When the militant antichoice organization Operation Rescue attacked New York in force during the Democratic National Convention, I volunteered with the National Abortion Rights Action League doing clinic defense. We gathered at various clinics at six a.m., locked our arms, and protected the entering women from screeching picketers with gory, unforgivable signs. I had rarely felt such a clear sense of being a participant in the fight of right against wrong. We were right; they were wrong.

I didn’t really tell Andy or anyone else how badly I wanted to keep the baby, how my heart twisted in protest against the decision my head had made. I was nineteen and my boyfriend didn’t want a baby. I would rather have chewed tacks than asked my parents for help. My friends were career-minded artists. My choice was spelled out.

I hung out in Penny’s kitchen, my old kitchen, and drank tea.

“It’s a loss,” she said. She’d had an abortion a few years before. “I don’t regret it, but it still haunts me.”

“Nineteen years ago my birth mother had this same conversation with her best friend. She came up with a different solution.”

“She was a different girl in a different time. This is your life, not hers.”

But I thought about my birth mother probably more than I ever had as I made my decision. And in my thoughts she wasn’t a long-limbed ballerina in a spotlight; she was a girl like me, imperfect and feeling totally screwed. I wondered if, like me, some part of her had believed that her boyfriend was going to turn around and tell her that she wasn’t alone. His eyes would have the tilt, the gleam of a man who had changed his mind. He would offer her a family, a little bohemian tribe. And she would offer him one right back. And her life would change in dazzling and unexpected ways.

When I had thought I was pregnant in Brunei, the choice to keep the baby against all odds had seemed so simple, so noble. Maybe deep down I’d known all along that I never was pregnant.

I thought of my adoptive mother newly married and vacuuming the brown rug in her New Jersey apartment as again a month came and went without anything taking root inside her, her insides slippery and hollow and out of her control. I thought of her ticking off each interminable minute of each month until doctors became lawyers and creating a family became a project of proportions neither she nor my father had ever dreamed of.

But then there was the baby, the perfect and whole baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket and sleeping through the flight from Chicago to New York, breathing in and out and smelling like sweet, powdery newness. My mother’s life changed in dazzling and unexpected ways. And for a moment, she was happy.

It was the end of summer, the beginning of September—usually my favorite month in New York.

But this was what savvy girls did, postfeminist girls, girls with futures, right? They tried hard not to get knocked up in the first place, but if the unfortunate accident happened they grimly proceeded to Planned Parenthood and exercised the choice their mothers had fought so hard to guarantee them. They did it and maybe went to some therapy. They did it and acknowledged the scar tissue, but they did it.

A baby was an unthinkable encumbrance. Having a baby at nineteen was something only girls in urban projects and Midwestern trailers did, girls who knew that it was unlikely that their future would differ from their mother’s life anyway. But my mother had raised me to believe that without question my life would differ from hers.

My body, my choice, I had shouted on the steps of the United States Capitol building. And so it was. It was my choice alone and it was alone that I sat, in an office on the second floor of a building somewhere in Midtown.

“Ninety-nine percent effective my ass,” she snorted.

Every plastic bucket of a seat was filled. My arms brushed the arms of the women on either side of me. I spoke to no one.

Andy’s genes, I thought. Andy’s wonderful, brilliant, musical genes. I recognized that I was on the precipice of something irreversible, far more so than any choice I’d made before that. A piece of me was turning cold, dying. Maybe it was the piece that believed so strongly in my own rightness, in my own goodness, in the fact that I would do better than my mother, my mothers, that I’d outshine them both by immeasurable wattage. I’d outrun them both by a thousand miles.

Instead I shuffled down the hallway, no better than they. Worse. Worse.

One thing they often tell adopted children is, Your birth mother loved you so very much that she gave you away so you could have a better life. That may be true. It may also be true that if she had loved you just a little bit more, she would have kept you.

I didn’t love my baby enough. But I did love her in those last moments. I could feel her with me. And in my head floated the “stages-of-development” fetuses, the plaster casts on display in the Museum of Natural History, the exhibit my father had taken me to see as a child, the miracle of life.

What did she look like? Her eyelids. Her ears. Her hands folded over her tiny, beating heart.

“If you would just stop shaking, I could get this needle in.”

Silent tears streamed across my temples and into my hairline. Finally, I felt the sting in the crook of my elbow and then the swell at the back of my throat and then the sleepy warmth.

In the moment before the twilight sleep took me into nothingness, I dreamed of the hospital, of my father. You don’t see a vein; you feel a vein. It was a recurring dream, grounded at least partly in memory.

An inept medical tech stabbed at my arm with a needle. This was my least favorite part about the hospital. I looked in the other direction, the same silent tears running down my face. My father watched from the other side of the room until his rage overtook his sense of decorum and he lifted the tech off his seat by the collar of his lab coat and threw him up against the wall. He held the man there by his throat and pointed an emphatic finger a centimeter away from the tech’s nose.

“You don’t see a vein, you fucking moron. You feel a vein.”

He dropped the man and sat beside me, gently and capably feeling for the vein in the hollow of my elbow before inserting the IV catheter in one try.

I don’t know if this occurrence was a hallucination or the real thing, but I know that in my dream replay of that moment, I love my dad so much.

I bled through pad after pad. Andy found a friend who had some Vicodin. I took one. Then I took another, and was magically enveloped in a soft cloud of okay that floated me into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

When I woke, a brick-red stain, brown at the dried edges, was spread out on the sheet beneath me. Something was wrong. I took two more Vicodin and thought, If I just had a Vicodin tree, a never-ending supply, my problems would all be solved, would melt into the ground like butter into toast.

When by the afternoon the bleeding hadn’t stopped, I called my doctor and left a message. I considered a trip to the emergency room, but the thought of a New York emergency room on a Saturday afternoon drove me back to the Vicodin bottle and back into bed, towels folded underneath me. It took a few days before the bleeding finally eased. The doctor told me it was caused by something called “retained products,” pieces of tissue that hadn’t been properly removed. Retained products. You try to scoop out the consequences of your actions but the residue hangs on. She called it harmless—painful and disturbing, but ultimately harmless. I wonder sometimes now—after injecting countless syringes full of powerful hormones into my stomach, after going to clinic after clinic for a series of fertility procedures straight out of the movie Species, all of them failing—if she was wrong.

I curled around a heating pad and watched Law & Order. I watched it and then I just kept watching. The doctor at the clinic had said that I would be up and around in a day or two, so Andy couldn’t really understand why I stayed in bed for two weeks watching television. It wasn’t the pain. That went away after a few days. And the Vicodin went away a few days after that and in place of warm nothingness I found a pit, a crater, a black hole, the sides of it lined with retained products.

I wanted to fall into that black hole and become so small that the force of the compression itself would send me exploding into a billion pieces, would explode my arrogance and my careless decisions, explode the unshakable sadness, the heavy stone tied around my throat from the inside. I wanted to give up and just explode the self I couldn’t quite find, flailing and unwise. My own big bang. Please, I begged whomever, whatever, let me just fall apart and start over.