My initial conversations with Jay led me to believe that we had much in common: Jay enjoyed reading fine contemporary fiction, as did I. Furthermore, his sophistication appeared to encompass not only the academic but the sexual. Indeed, he seemed genuinely interested in and excited about my work in the sex industry. At last, I thought, I had found a man who was open-minded and confident enough to appreciate my intellectual as well as my physical endowments.

While my three previous boyfriends had been relatively well educated and very attractive, none had shared my enthusiasm for literature and other scholarly pursuits. Jay, a gawky ectomorph with slightly buck upper teeth, perpetually wet lips and a lush growth of back and shoulder hair, somehow convinced me that his academic leanings and intellectual prowess would more than compensate for his Don Knotts-meets-"Clan of the Cave Bear" mien.

After spending a week or so with Jay, I was chagrined to discover that despite having fine taste in literature, he almost never read for pleasure. Instead, he chose to ensconce himself in front of an oversize television, like an acolyte at High Mass, for two or three hours of mandatory prime-time programming each evening. On the rare occasion that he was forced to miss "Buffy," "Xena," "Felicity" or "Dawson's Creek" because of extraresidential social engagements, he made sure to tape them and spent Saturday reverentially "catching up." Having voluntarily given away my television years before in favor of more socially and intellectually rewarding activities (reciting Horace while lap-dancing, three-way sex with my fellow über-wenches as Plácido Domingo crooned "Che ... non m'inganna!"), I had assumed that Jay, a career academic, would share my disinterest in mass media. I was revolted not by the quality of Jay's chosen shows, some of which turned out to be quite well-written, but by the stupefying quantity of them.

Jay had other hobbies besides watching television. He had recently given up Dungeons & Dragons in favor of Magic, an elaborate card game that features an assortment of monsters, elves, dragons, spells, counterspells and other accouterments of the puerile fantasy genre. He spent hours organizing hundreds of cards into "powerful" decks that had the proper ratios of magical creatures, wizards and demons. He also attended Magic consortiums where he invariably exceeded the other participants' mean age by at least 12 years.

Such housebound pastimes could be excused, given Jay's numerous maladies. Wracked with a passel of allergies ranging from the lethal (nuts) to the merely annoying (pet hair, dust, smoke, sun, face creams) and plagued by insomnia, anxiety, chronic dyspepsia and (seriously) an inordinate dread of amusement parks, Jay could be compared to an adult sufferer of Munchausen by proxy. Despite this abecedarium of physical and psychological infirmities, Jay participated several times a month in karate workshops. He was ostensibly a black belt, but was so feeble that I could pin him with minimal effort. He dabbled in writing: goofy screenplays à la "There's Something About Mary" that starred -- you guessed it -- gawky, allergy-ridden antiheroes who fell in with troupes of benevolent sex sirens during the course of picaresque bumblings.

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