BOWING TO FINANCIAL NECESSITY, G. PUBLISHED, WITH the precision of a metronome, one book a year. For several weeks he had been writing about us, our love story, and about what he called his “redemption.” It was to be a novel inspired by our meeting, which would, he said, be a magnificent account of a “stellar” love affair, of the way he had turned his dissipated lifestyle around for the beautiful eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl. What a romantic subject! Don Juan, cured of his sexual frenzy, determined no longer to be dominated by his urges, vowing that he was a changed man, upon whom mercy had alighted along with Cupid’s arrow.

Happy, excited, and focused, he sat at his typewriter writing up notes from his black Moleskine notebook. The same one as Hemingway used, he told me. I was still strictly forbidden to read his diary, which was both private and literary. But since G. had begun writing his novel, reality had swapped sides: I was gradually turning from a muse into a fictional character.