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What can I tell you about Vanessa Daws?
    She had a pretty, impish face, a secret cigarette habit, a bosom of astonishing — and ultimately fraudulent — providence. She was a Southerner through and through, raised on peach cobbler and good manners, elaborate in her makeup protocols. She also had literary aspirations, which gave her one rather unfortunate thing in common with me.
    Vanessa was the first woman I slept with during my two-year tour of duty in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I had come to study writing and alienate everyone on the face of the earth.
    It began like this: I walked into the office of Triad Style and saw a babe standing by the bulletin board. Triad Style was the weekly fishwrap (published by the daily fishwrap) for whom I wrote freelance pieces under the nom de dork S.B. Almond.

    On balance, these pieces sucked ass. They were supposed to be wry accounts of various local attractions (the gun show, the monster truck show). I recall reviewing the local dumps at one point. All quite glamorous.
    Nonetheless, within the small, damp universe of Triad Style the name S.B. Almond radiated a certain tragic cachet.
    This meant that Vanessa had heard of me. I know this because I fucked around the office long enough to secure an introduction.
    "So you're S.B. Almond," she said. Her accent was a smoky, teasing drawl. "What's the S.B. stand for?"
    "Stupid bastard," I said. (It was my standard line.)
    "Your mother must be proud," she said.
  

  All our conversations were like this: the forced wit of the minor sitcom.
    If I'd been a little brighter, I would have figured out that Vanessa knew who I was, that she'd already done a background check and decided I was her next Prince Charming.
    In any event, I was astounded when she invited me to her place for a home-cooked meal. I spent the next week in a not-unpleasant fizz of coital anticipation.
    And I can remember driving south for that inaugural dinner, past the town of Climax, North Carolina, where I wished her to live, as this suited my slobbering poetic intentions. I remember, too, the nervous shuffle of my blood as I walked up the path to her door.
    She was dressed in an outfit I associated with debauched debutantes: the plunging velvet neckline, the tight skirt.
    Her house was fantastic, a Southern Living demo, down to the matte and copper accents. As it turned out, it wasn't her house at all. It was her mother's, but her mother was out of town and her dad had died when she was a young girl and so it was just us two and a meal of boggling proteinous complexity.
    I should note that I was in grad school, meaning a general diet of Apple Jacks, cheese and crackers filched from readings, Progresso soup if I was feeling flush.
    Vanessa lit candles and poured wine and praised my appetite. She ate little, drank much, and laughed politely at my horny boy patter. The wine helped.
    By the time we were through dessert — some kind of pudding, as I recall — it was nearly midnight. I couldn't be expected to drive home in such a state, could I? No sir.
    She led me upstairs. And I remember her pausing on the stairs to show me a photo of herself as a girl. Actually, it was a series, a kind of devotional gallery. In each, Vanessa was dressed in a leotard, flat-chested and beaming. She had wanted to be a dancer, but a bum ankle had done her wrong.
    Then we were on the bed in the guest bedroom, sharing a cigarette and Vanessa was asking if I needed to be tucked in. Then we were kissing, smashing our ashtray tongues together and grabbing for the junk.
    The tenor of these initial moments — lunging, impatient — seemed sexy enough to both of us. We'd seen enough movies in which such hostile incompetence passed for passion. It wasn't long before her shirt was peeled and her bra snapped open and there they were, great buoyant globes in the Playboy register.
    They really were something to see; my limbic brain went into an immediate suckling frenzy.