The physicist said that the girl was an ordinary star, and the boy was a black hole. You couldn’t see the boy, but the girl whirling around him was evidence that he existed, and was holding her in orbit. This seemed like corroboration of “The Seducer’s Diary,” where the seducer disappeared and Cordelia was going in circles. It seemed to me that the elements whirling around me in my own life were also somehow held in place by Ivan’s absence, or were there because of him—to counterbalance a void.
