Part One: Chapter One Summary

David, the narrator, looks back on his past relationships. Hella was the woman he felt most strongly for, but he realizes now that there was never a great amount of substance to their relationship, even though by all appearances their relationship was quite serious. He even told her that he loved her once, but he realized even at the time that, to some extent, he could not really mean it. Their relationship began to decay when he met Giovanni in Paris and David recalls fonder times, before Giovanni was executed.

David was, admittedly, a rather prolific liar, but the one lie that he truly regrets is when he told Giovanni he had never slept with another man before. There was another when he was younger, a boy named Joey. The two were good friends and were nearly...