Perla by Carolina de Robertis Page B

psychologist,” I said. “I’m supposed to do the same.”
    “Looks like you won.”
    “I liked hearing your stories.” I meant this. I could have listened for hours more.
    “Well, you owe me some next time.”
    He invited me back to his apartment that night, and I declined, though I did kiss him long and slow at the subway gate before descending to catch my train. On the next date, at the same trattoria, he was ready with his questions.
    “I don’t want to talk about my family,” I said.
    “Why not?”
    I waved my hand, hoping that the gesture seemed both confident and casual. “Your family doesn’t define who you are.”
    “It doesn’t?”
    “No.”
    “But it’s where you come from. Where you begin.”
    “Not where I begin.”
    He looked slightly amused. “Where do you begin, then, Perla?”
    Without thinking, I said, “With Rimbaud.”
    He laughed. “What? The poet?”
    “The poet.” I spent the next hour weaving a creation story for myself, miraculously devoid of parents. I described my experience at Romina’s bookshelves, opening volume after volume as if opening the gates to textual cities. In those cities, among those words and meanings, I said, the true trajectory of my life began. Everything I said was true, though of course I left out details of my friendship with Romina—her discovery in the study, her uncles, the note I read and reread in the bathroom stall. Instead, I focused on the appetite with which we’d open book after book, picking out delectable lines to roll against the tongue of the mind, the wonder of those hours, the way the words and visions and ideas sparked from those pages and dug into my flesh like splinters of a fire started on the page by a writer long dead. It made me fall in love with the mind, I said. It made mesee how everything—ideas, poems, buildings, even wars—ultimately began in the mind. First comes a thought, then words to carry it, and only then does a thing take shape in a concrete way. In the beginning there truly was the Word. Eventually I became a student of the mind, the place where words begin, so that one day I could accompany people’s journeys into the dizzying labyrinths within them, and help them navigate, help them change. It felt good to tell the story without the context of my mother this, my father that. My own story, unhampered, as if my parents did not exist. I had never described my life that way to anyone. I felt entranced by my own telling, and wondered how much of it was fiction and how much a new way of looking at the truth.
    “So Freud has the keys to the labyrinth?” Gabriel asked.
    “Some of them.”
    “Do you believe everything he said?”
    “Even Freud didn’t believe everything he said. He contradicted himself, he made mistakes. But he was the first to unlock certain rooms of the psyche.”
    “Such as?”
    “Unconscious desires.”
    “Mm hm. Unconsious desires.” He looked at me with a subtle smile. He was so confident with his lust, I found it both maddening and impressive. “Do you have any of those?”
    “If I did, I wouldn’t know it, would I?”
    That night, I did go back to his apartment, and he turned on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and poured us wine and we kissed in the middle of the living room, on our feet, swaying, a kiss that started with languor and rapidly intensified as though it had a will of its own. We were on our knees, kissing, we were on the floor, his hands on my breasts and in my hair and everywhere else all at once or so it seemed, and my hands too, we were there a long time, we didn’t take our clothes off but we pressed so forcefully it seemed the fabric might burn away from our bodies. Finally, I said, reluctantly, “I should go.”
    “Do you have to?”
    “I have to.”
    He brushed my hair back, very gently. “I’ve never met a girl like you.”
    “Oh, shut up.”
    “It’s true.”
    “You’re good at this, Gabriel. But I’m still not going to have sex with you.”
    He made a