A Hostel

I never told this story to my husband, but I think I would eventually, on a sticky February night, while we lay naked in bed with the ceiling fan running at its highest speed.

We'd be waiting out a storm coming in from the south, and I'd look at her concerned part lying red and heavy on her thigh, and I'd think how I'd contemplate getting it in my mouth. The rooms were less than two degrees cold.

This will remind me of Roy and his wife and I will feel like talking about them. I'll start by telling my husband that I knew this couple, when they found out they were going to have a baby, they started taking long walks together in the evenings.

I may not use their real names. However, it would be hard not to highlight Roy's personality, which has almost shaped his personality.

His given name – which caused him considerable embarrassment – was Royal, and, in contrast to the grandeur of his parents, he developed a regal personality. He was a humble, self-respecting person. He lived his life – at least his public and social life – as if he were answering a survey about it.

If someone asks, "Roy, how was your trip to Fiji?" Their answer might be, "I would describe myself as enjoying it." The problem was that he took his humility so far that in the end, he came across as king – detached, altruistic, devoid of personality.

His opinions, tastes and desires were as moderate as a king's should be. A polite king, I mean, who exists with a constitution and whose occasional irrelevance arouses a complicated optimism about the possibility of a republic. Or, of course, a queen.

There is no need to use Roy's wife's real name; In fact, she is no longer his wife. I'll call her Mandy. Such a name would not reveal anything about her except, perhaps, that she was beautiful and athletic.

The evening walk was a response to Mandy's fear that pregnancy might change her body. Not that Mandy was vain; He just liked being good at everything he did. That's why he liked to have a good body.

At the time, Roy and Mandy lived in Newtown, which, I would explain to my husband, was a crowded area of downtown Sydney that was dirty in the nineties but was slowly deteriorating.

He was part of that civilization: he bought a long, gabled house in North Newtown and equipped it with many skylights so that sunlight filtered like luminous smoke through the stairs and greeted him every morning above his bed. Wake up to a shining intersection. You can sit on their guest toilet and see the underside of the airplane.

The kitchen was new, too, and they had painted the front door dark red as if to advertise their upbeat personality.

They were both well-paid lawyers, and the timing of the pregnancy was part of a long-term plan that took into account rising property values in their neighborhood.

Every night, they would walk hand in hand through the streets of Newtown, Mandy's baby bump visible. At the same time, Sydney Uni students smoked joints in the tiled front gardens of their rented houses, and Thai restaurant staff tossed bags of scented rubbish into narrow alleys.

Sometimes Roy and Mandy would walk down a particular road with backpacker hostels. The hostel was shabby and noisy, but Roy and Mandy claimed to like it; He said it reminded him of his student travels across Europe, being nineteen and crawling into each other's beds in crowded dorms.

There was that time in a hostel in Mykonos when Roy was sitting on a top bunk, his legs dangling, while Mandy stood between them and sucking him off, and some raunchy Croatian girls burst into the hostel.

I heard Roy and Mandy tell this story several times, separately and together. Roy described it as if someone had informed him that, if he did not tell a slightly risky story at least once every year or two, he would be considered extremely adventurous.

Mandy tells it with genuine joy as if she is amazed at herself that she has lived a life in which such an event has occurred.

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