It was a dark windy night in Manhattan and I was staring from across the street at the blue-green basalt frontispiece of the Museum of Sex where I had agreed to meet a man named Scott before our first date, whom I had met on a sugar-daddy website after he messaged asking what I was “looking for” and I replied with Mostly flattery and rent money and he replied That is the funniest thing—just the funniest thing…, and the museum’s white-bordered windows glowed alluringly against the street and I thought maybe I’d hail a cab back to my Brooklyn studio and bake ready-made crescent rolls and watch Golden Girls till 5AM but it seemed I was involuntarily crossing the lengthy street, and once inside the gift shop I rifled desultorily through plastic bins of dildo keychains and crème brulée-flavored condoms and forty-dollar coffee-table photobooks of naked burlesque dancers, and I flipped to a page featuring a woman gazing wistfully at the camera with her arm propped in an open birdcage and a handheld mirror occluding her genitalia and a fat-eyed dove perched on her shoulder, and behind me a man’s gruff tenor voice muttered Getting any ideas and I turned to find Scott grinning in a starch-stiff gray suit and I said Oh yeah I think I want a pussy mirror, and he laughed tilting his head at the entrance and said Restaurant’s that way so I slunk my trembling arm through his and shivered for some strange remote reason I couldn’t locate, and after trotting us across the crosswalk Scott opened the restaurant’s enormous glass door and inside an austere black-haired hostess nodded at us with pinched lips and led us up a flight of burnished golden stairs, and we were seated at a balcony table overlooking the whole restaurant of thin metropolitans with grim soporific expressions and Scott whispered to me Best Lebanese food in the city and I thought no one could ever know that, and after placing an order with a beaming glassy-skinned waitress Scott smiled at me and said So how long have you been distractingly gorgeous and I laughed saying As soon as I began transitioning two years ago, and drumming his fingertips on the white-linened table Scott said But you are also a woman of discerning intelligence and I nodded replying in a low purr Yes that’s right and he smirked saying Crucial in times of both frivolity and crisis, and I was overcome with a sudden profound wave of sadness for the elusiveness of love even after all the labor and the turmoil of transitioning into a beautiful woman in a cramped chair in a dark city, and our waitress with a look of expectant glee set plates upon plates of food across our table and Scott murmured a curt Thank you hon as I surveyed the feast, there was labneh with crushed pine nuts and muhammara with seed chips and baba ganoush with warm pita, there were dolmas in saffron oil and charred halloumi strips on kale and roasted carrots with half-lemons, and as we began devouring from our piled side-plates Scott lectured clumsily with a pointed knife about names of the various dishes of Lebanon and I smiled in my brain because I was actually Lebanese and knew more than him, and I asked Scott what he did for work and he detailed a storied career in aviation logistics and I attempted to internalize if not the practical details then the general atmosphere, and he asked about my own work and after licking caramelized-onion hummus from a small spoon I said I do copywriting mostly and write poems on the side and Scott nodded sincerely saying A noble vocation, and I gazed out at the fluttering blue-black shapes of diners below slicing into sea bass and lamb cutlets and without lifting my eyes I said Are you seriously going to help me with rent, and when I glanced back Scott was staring at me like I’d asked if he was a person and finally he said Of course I am and I nodded squirming against a dull wet throb in my left abdomen, and once Scott had paid the check we departed from the restaurant with his beefy hand cupping my lower back and walked a couple scaffolding-heavy side streets to his black Range Rover parked beside a closed futuristic cupcakery, and once in the car Scott asked So what’s our move for the night and I braced my dark-red cardigan snugly around my clavicles saying I think I’d like to go home and he nodded smiling amenably and shifted the great dim machine into drive, and as I leaned my head out into the cool night and watched the neon storefronts flicker by like frames on a zoetrope the song Drops of Jupiter pattered on the stereo and I shut my tired merciful eyes, tell me—did Venus blow your mind?/ was it everything you wanted to find? I heard as the flooding wind tousled my hair and dried the inner corners of my eyes.

As the car pulled alongside my apartment building, I gathered up my cardigan and said You can walk me upstairs if you like and with an effortfully unpresumptuous face Scott said Yes of course, so I led him through the narrow black corridor with orbicular gentrification lighting and into my small studio where a white couch and lofted bed over deskspace were crammed tightly toward a single corner, and Scott scanned the room leaning against a quaint square of counter space and said I don’t know how you kids live like this and throwing my belongings on a bare window ledge I said I get out a lot, and Scott reached into his suit jacket extracting a slim black box and handed it to me saying That perfume you’d mentioned and taking it I said Scott my god you shouldn’t have, and unboxing it I spritzed it across my naked décolletage and it smelled of steamed black coffee and dew-flecked vanilla and drunkenly I slurred I wanna fuck it, and Scott laughed and inhaling its waft from a respectful distance said It suits you nicely and I narrowed my eyes at him and with abrupt paranoia hissed I’m not going to fuck you, and nervously he pinched at the puckered seam of his pants and said I’m not asking anything of you and with tears forming hotly at my eyes I said Because I’m not some easy fucking broad, Scott wrapped his arms around me and stammering wetly into his suit coat shoulder I said again I’m not some easy fucking broad and he stroked the split black ends of my hair, and when we were finished having sex I replaced my gray satin dress and shut the drafty window and Scott was taciturn as he reformulated his suit in a dimly lit corner, and I shifted meekly on the couch waiting for some chemical deluge of pleasure or limerence or enlightenment that might make sense of this turbid pang of meaninglessness and self-betrayal, I stared at the rosy pallor of my exposed knee waiting for that sublime clarifying feeling and felt only the slow attunement to the refrigerator’s sluggish hum and Scott staring at me from the room’s opposite edge, and quietly he said I should probably get going and desperately I asked Do you think you could ever fall in love with me and his head lurched saying Come again, and I said Well I’m younger than you and prettier and obviously a better conversationalist and frowning he said I might contest like two of those and ignoring him I went on So naturally one might reason that you would want to fall in love with me, and that if either of us were using the other it would be me using you for money and not you using me for sex and then leaving me alone here to count the floorboards, and in a soft consoling tone Scott said I don’t know what to tell you hon but I had a nice time and would love to see you again, and I snarled Yes but you’d be content to see any other twenty-something transexual with low-impulse control and he asked vexedly Do you even like me and I said Of course I don’t, and dropping the guise of civility he sneered This is the problem with you fucking trannies—you think you’re alone because of transphobia but it’s really because you’re fucking cunts, and I laughed saying Says the man who bought me a sixty-dollar perfume so he could renege on hundreds in rent money and he rolled his eyes muttering You’ll be fine Miss Poems-on-the-side, and he strode briskly to the front door and hurling it open I said Thanks for the labneh and without turning around he said Thanks for the foot job and after slamming it behind him I immediately began weeping, I collapsed on my little white loveseat and threw open the windows feeling a sharp distant chill and seeing the minor pointillism of stars peek through the vague haze of light pollution, oh one of these days I would not let someone pay to treat me like a woman and I would not give myself away to feel like one, I would take myself to a five-star Lebanese restaurant and glut myself on warm breads and mezze dips and the meticulous couples would glower at my rabid appetite and worldly self-possession, and I heard it go on: can you imagine no love—pride—deep fried chicken—your best friend always stickin’ up for you?, oh can you imagine what a life it would be becoming someone else without fixating on that caustic interior ache of what you no longer are, can you imagine this place with your perfect body’s warm blood in the cold world where you listen to the music beyond your window and not the terrifying spaces in between.