I want to tell you something, so listen. Every time it starts to rain, I would like to have sex. I’ve felt this way since before I knew what sex was. When I was a child and it began to rain I removed myself quietly from the company of guests and went upstairs and crawled…

Well, she said, you certainly have your hands full. He came to the door with an alligator oven mitt on one hand and holding a saucy wooden spoon in his other. She stepped inside and accepted his kiss on her cheek. Unbuttoning her overcoat, she spread open her lapels to reveal pale pink satin lining…

She parked, knocked, knocked again. He came to the door. When he saw her, he stepped out and shut it quickly behind himself. She explained her presence by leading him to the side of her van, where she showed him her sixteen monoflorals and two honeydews. Pointing out their different forms, she told him Sundays…

Only I can see you. There her Portuguese lover stopped, setting down the book and pulling her feet onto his lap, massaging, kneading, thumbs pressed into her soles. She was wearing black silk stockings with black seams up the backs of her legs—Cuban heel, thigh high, lace top. She had put them on after her…

Odd, how time passes. Only two nights ago, her Portuguese lover had read to her on the couch: how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts, how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs. She had imagined…

The first time her husband laid eyes on her, it was almost love at first sight. A traveling Cubicle Reconfiguration & Office Furniture Relocation Consultant, he stopped one Thursday afternoon to fill up in Fenwick and overheard the gas attendant telling tourists in a red T-bird convertible about the tea house’s BLT special: double decker…

Before the young lover, when she had only the Portuguese lover, the tea house woman avoided his street, not wanting to see the lights on in his house, or the silhouette perhaps of another woman keeping him company. Every Saturday night, she drove the long way to and from Beaman & Sons, where she has…

He is purple. Hard. Awake, he reaches with both arms and pulls the tea house woman toward him, onto him. They are—no, we are—chest to chest, and I am in your ear now whispering, You’re going to make me come. This is new. My husband always finished first, even on our wedding night, and he…

She surprises herself by taking a new lover. He is younger than her Portuguese lover, and choosing between them is as simple as putting their names into a paper bag and releasing one, folding it in half, and tucking it into her apron pocket for an afternoon. This morning she lies awake in bed, waiting…

The first word of the tea house woman’s story is dripping, which could refer to anything: the faulty kitchen faucet; the basement ceiling of the tea house after the flood; stems of wildflower bouquets pulled putrid from tall white pitchers; even her own wet cunt.

I write this book in offering to the tea house woman, that complicated figure who appears first as bride-to-be in We Take Me Apart and then, years later, as widow in Desire: A Haunting, which I have only just completed. To be honest, this is a bad period for me. It’s the end of a…

Thank you, Steve Himmer for hosting me, and thank you, everyone who came to read these essays and such during my month as the writer in residence at Necessary Fiction. As a coda, a palate cleanser, a parting shot, I’ve posted some photographs I took of animals this winter. I find it fascinating that the…