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Her boyfriend, a grade older, is “laid out on a bed, like a patient etherized upon a table.”

The pleasure this writing affords — its plushness, patient description, etherizing beauty — does not stem from its closeness to life, however.

The patient, a woman in her twenties, lay etherized upon a table.

It hit him in their bedroom on a summer day in 2016: an unfamiliar, etherizing wave.

Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which of course begins, “Shall we go then, you and I, while the evening is spread out across the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.”