When I saw Nicole the following week, she seemed sad. "It's this guy," she said and sighed heavily. "The one I told you about who MCs some of the shows at the Slipper Room. I really like him, but he only calls me at night when he's drunk and he wants to come over and I'm like, 'You can't just use me!'" She looked at me expectantly.

I spent the entire evening advising her not to call him. We discussed repeatedly why it would be a bad idea, that he was using her and she should hold off and see if he would be more respectful. As the evening wore on, her body would occasionally go rigid and she would glare into her drink and say with progressively more emotion, "Fuck him." Then she'd relax and turn to me to ask yet again, "Should I call him? I shouldn't right?"

She apologized each time, but it was like she couldn't help herself. I tried to divert the conversation down another path, but she was un-distractible. "We should go to the Met some day," I said, mumbling something about Francis Bacon as her eyebrows came together and she angrily pulled an ice cube out of her empty sangria glass.

Her head jerked toward me. "So. You don't think I should call him?"

The next time she called I didn't answer. I was having my own problems. Nick and I had broken up temporarily. I had found a pair of white women's Marks and Spencer underwear wadded up in the bottom of his Donna Karen sheets one morning. "Who's the British bitch?" I should have asked him, flinging the soiled panties into his face as I walked out on him for good. But instead I stayed away from him for exactly one week before allowing myself to be fed excuses and finally dinner. We went to a new Scandinavian restaurant and sat at a table next to Sarah Jessica Parker. According to Nick, the underwear belonged to his friend Pam, a miserable woman who worked in fashion and whom I only ever saw smile — an evil, close-lipped grimace — when she was making fun of someone's clothing. He didn't know why or when she'd taken them off, he insisted, as I concentrated on spearing a caper off of my plate. As little comfort as that line of reasoning was, I doubted the panties were even hers. They weren't a designer brand.

Nicole and I met one other time. It was a hot summer day and we took the train to Brighton Beach. We lay on a large towel, and watched a group of Puerto Rican girls laugh as a group of boys tried to touch their breasts. "Some people are so stupid," Nicole said. Her body was dotted with bruises I'd never seen, even when watching her dance. Perhaps they showed up more vividly in the direct sunlight. I wondered how many were from men.

She turned on her stomach away from me, and I felt sad about the friendship. I couldn't keep up. When she started talking about the last man she had sex with and how she hadn't heard back from him in several days, I felt like crying, knowing the questions were about to start again. "Should I call?" she'd ask me in a second.  And I knew that no matter what I said or what she did, she would probably never see this man again.

On the way home, as the Q train rattled past her childhood neighborhood, she told me again about her mother who she could never please and who hurled abuse at her when she returned for family meals, whom she was no longer speaking to as a result. I was sorry, I said. How awful. A girl in yellow short shorts got onto the train, holding a cell phone like a boombox. 

"That's awful," I repeated. There was a lot of sadness in Nicole. But also a lot of crazy. And right there, as the sun dropped down over the row houses, she got a nosebleed. A drop of crimson appeared on her porcelain skin. "Fuck," she whispered. We found some napkins in her beach bag. It didn't stop bleeding for the rest of the ride home. When we parted at Prospect Park, hugging awkwardly goodbye as she told me again that she didn't need any help, she was still holding the tissue to her nose.

Though I would have stayed with her if she'd asked me to, the truth was that I didn't want to help her. I wanted to go home and shut my bedroom door and lie down. It wasn't just annoyance — spending time with her left me sad and depleted and, with my relationship (and career, as it happened) in shambles, I already had enough sad, depleting things in my life. I was just as confused and miserable as Nicole, and I didn't have any other persona to escape into.

After my massive-headed roommate tried to commit suicide, I moved to an apartment in Manhattan. I lost touch with Nicole for a bit. The voicemails accumulated in my phone and I promised myself I'd return her calls as soon as I was settled, when I could be more patient and caring. Then the calls stopped coming and I didn't have to be reminded of how much I was disappointing her. It was a relief. I'd left it for too long now anyway, there was no excuse I could give to explain why I didn't call her back.

In a show of finality, she removed me from Facebook. I had been excommunicated, just like her mother. I didn't really blame her.

That winter I found a flier at a food festival in Tribeca. It showed Athena standing with several other burlesque dancers, looking gorgeous in a feathered headdress. I brought the postcard with her picture back with me to Nick's cold loft in the West Village. A few months later, as Nick and I broke up for good, I noticed the postcard sitting in a woven paper basket on his coffee table, where I must have left it. It may very well still be there — a rogue piece of Brooklyn — buried in a lonely pile of catalogs selling Lucite furniture and wall adhesives shaped like birds.

It took only days to feel like myself again after I finally left him. It was amazing, really, that a relationship that tortured me for more than a year could be so absent from my mind just a week later. How pointless all of that suffering was.

But though I felt nothing but relief at being away from Nick's detached judgment, I felt and occasionally still feel a bit sad about Nicole. I like to imagine that she's made it to the top of her game and has some adoring, kinky man with a pencil moustache and a thing for pocket watches looking after her and reassuring her that she is just fine — that he loves her despite, perhaps even because of, her insecurities.

Occasionally, when I pass by a toy store, I fantasize about buying some Matchbox cars and photographing myself stomping on them wearing only old-fashioned lacy underwear. Then I'd send a picture to Nicole as an offering — "From one giant to another" written on the back.