The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Movement One — A Note Before We Begin

We find ourselves, once again, in the same shape we always seem to find ourselves in. A woman. A man. A conversation.

Can you tell the difference between this chapter and all the others I've already handed you? Go on, take a moment with it. I'll wait. I do so love watching someone actually try, rather than simply nodding along the way most readers do, eager to get to whatever comes next rather than properly sitting with what's currently in front of them.

There isn't one. I want to be honest with you about that, the way I try to be honest with you about most things, eventually, in my own unhurried time. The shape is identical. A woman, a man, a conversation, the same patient architecture this whole account has been built out of since the very first page. What's different — and I think, if you've been paying the kind of attention I keep asking you to pay, you might already have felt it before I said a single word about it — is a certain falseness sitting underneath the familiar shape tonight, the way a held note can start to sound wrong the longer you make yourself listen to it, even though not a single pitch inside it has actually changed.

I want you to sit with that word a moment. Falseness. Not a lie, exactly — nothing I'm about to hand you tonight is untrue, not one word of it. Simply the particular unease of a warm thing arriving directly on the heels of a cold one, the way a held breath sometimes arrives directly on the heels of one that never quite finished. I don't think warmth is ever truly false, but I think it can feel that way, sitting this close to everything else I've been telling you.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I think you already know why. We've spent rather a lot of pages together, you and I, circling the particular dilemma of simply existing — mirrors that shouldn't break, memories that arrive from bodies that were never quite anyone's own, a power somewhere out at the edge of everything that has, lately, gone a little too quiet for my taste. It would be strange, wouldn't it, to sit inside all of that and then turn around and tell you a warm, ordinary little story about love as though none of it mattered. As though gold light and a woman's laugh were somehow separate from everything else I've been circling. I don't think they are separate. I think that's rather the whole, quiet point of tonight.

I want you to hold both things at once, the way I've been holding them myself for longer than I'd like to admit. Somewhere, a power that isn't supposed to go quiet has gone quiet. Somewhere, a wall I never explained properly got broken, and a body I still don't know the whole truth of learned what it meant to bleed. And somewhere else entirely — the somewhere I'm about to hand you now — a woman who bites when she's frightened let herself be held anyway, because being held, whatever else it costs a person, has never once stopped being worth the cost. I don't think that second thing is smaller than the first, however much quieter it sounds sitting beside it. I think it might, in fact, be the entire reason any of the rest of it is worth surviving.

So let me hand this one over properly, the way it deserves to be handed over — not in my own voice, for once, but in his, the way it was always meant to be told, the particular pace only he seems able to bring to an afternoon like the one I'm about to give you. He tells it slowly. He tells it the way a man tells a story he's still, somewhere underneath all these centuries, mildly disbelieving actually happened to him. I'll step back now, and let him have the room.