I just want to know what it feels like to be a writer.

“Are all writers self-destructive?” she’d asked me, her eyes merely inquisitive, as if I were a tour guide and she was asking about the weather in Timbuktu.

PERFIDY BY JAN ALEXANDER 23THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 32

For twenty years I’ve had this picture frozen in my head: Elise in her green satin dress, the light going out of her fine-boned face as she watched her fiancé John fall in love with my girlfriend Claire.

That awful night began with Claire seething at me across a candlelit table. “This isn’t all there is to life, you know,” she said, taking surveillance of the restaurant, a downtown place that rock stars and Hollywood directors frequented back in the 1990s. Elise and John were running late, as usual.

From the nearest corner a quartet played Latin tunes. The saxophonist leaned back and sent his notes up to the heavens, as if he’d just discovered love. In my memory they were playing that old classic Perfidia, though it’s hard to believe they would have played the same song all ni…