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Claire and I have only known each other a month. We've seen each other six times and two of them don't count: the first being the day we met at a dinner party where the host had pressed the assembled into a game of Pictionary — we'd both been caustically skeptical, drawn together by our disdain for the too-eager responses of our fellow guests' to the forced atmosphere of innocent fun; I'd gotten her number on my way out the door — and the second being an aborted meeting two days before she went home to Ohio. We were supposed to see a free play in the park, but her mother had called in hysterics as we were walking toward the bandshell, revealing in fits and starts that Claire's Great Aunt Rose had died. Claire had never met Aunt Rose, but the news rattled her anyway. Her mom's tears were infectious. We cancelled the date so she could go home, compose herself, and talk her mother through her grief.

In between, I called her as often as I could without coming across as aggressive and greedy. She was warm with me on the phone, encouraging, as though she was clueless about — or willfully ignoring — the rules of engagement, all those protective maneuvers that slow intimacy down, and this made me wonder if maybe I was just a helpmeet to her, like a gay friend who happened to be straight.

When we've seen each other, the things we've done have been charmingly wholesome — a bike ride along the river, an animated movie, an afternoon stroll through Chinatown. Not one bar. Not a single swank restaurant. Nothing that might imply either of us is after anything more than a sympathetic friend with whom to talk about our mutually degraded and disastrous love lives. Each of us has recently excised ourselves from ugly relationships, mindfucks that lingered raw for months after the breakups. There've been four a.m. phone calls and gross accusations and soul-sucking nights of drinking at bars alone, or in my case, with girls whose sole attraction is how much they repel me.

During the bike ride, she told me she wished she could be a virgin again. "The things I know now, I don't want to know them. I wish sex and love were still mysteries, or at least that I could still think they were connected. Does that make any sense?"

I said it did. I wanted it to.

"The things he did to me. He left me feeling, I don't know, rotten. Like I reek. Like I'm a smell that won't go away no matter how hard you scrub."

Since she didn't go into the details of what he'd done, I've had to fill them in myself. But the only torments I can imagine

her going through are mildly heartbreaking, never any darker than bittersweet, like the quaint longings of early Motown tunes. I just can't see her allowing herself to be treated in a truly debased manner.

Part of this has to do with the way she looks. There's a preciousness to her appearance, like she's been protected from experiencing too much of the cruelty the rest of us too often face. She wears Mary Janes and bobby socks, sweaters with pearl buttons. She never slouches or carries herself in a way that betrays her essential self-respect. And beneath her long clipped-back curls, her face has an openness, a wholesomeness, that makes me think most men would feel the urge to shelter her and those who don't would steer clear assuming she doesn't put out. Everything about her says she's a nice girl.

This is in many ways why I'm so attracted to her. It's been a long time since I've felt worthy of the affection of a nice girl.

She still hasn't seen my apartment, and I hadn't seen hers until the night before she left. This was last Wednesday. She made me dinner, a chicken and wild rice concoction that wasn't very good — the chicken was dry, the rice was chewy, the complicated vegetable soufflé she'd attempted had burned in the oven. But that she'd tried so hard was sweet. We listened to records on the turntable her ex-boyfriend had abandoned with her and talked about her trip: Ohio, Aunt Rose's funeral, then an extended spell in the purgatory of her mom's home in Cleveland. She wasn't sure how long she'd be gone. She had obligations. Plans had been made for her. She was going to have to help redo the kitchen wallpaper, for one thing, and who knew what else. It was going to be torture. "If you knew my mom, you'd understand," she said. "I don't even want to go. But. And right when I'm getting to know you and everything."