The Way You Look Tonight

TH,S ONE

DIFFERENT?

He was in the teachers' lounge, 7:15 a.m., sipping the latte he'd picked up on his way to work and checking his e-mail before classes started, when he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen. His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzle­ment to fear—in the instant he recognized what it was (a blur of color, harsh light, movement) he hit the exit button and shot a look around the room to see if any­one had noticed. No one had. The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour, and those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops and looking as if they'd been drained of blood

overnight. It was Monday. The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started just before dawn. The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.

All of a sudden he was angry. What had Rob been think­ing? He could be fired. Would be. In a heartbeat. The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course, just to square up the param­eters. Downloading porn? At your workplace? That was so far beyond the pale the course didn't even mention it. His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped. He clicked on the next message—-some asinine joke his college roommate had sent out to everybody he'd ever known, all 30 or so of them with their e-mail addresses bunched at

the top or the screen—and deleted it before getting to the punch line. Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his ap­pointment at 3:30, after school let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap—orphans in Haiti, Viagra, An Oppor­tunity Too Unique to Miss Out On—which he ham­mered with the delete key, one after another, with a mounting irascibility that made Eugenie McCaffrey, the math teacher, look up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen. Rob had left no message, just the video. And the sub­ject heading: / Thought You'd Want to Know.

By lunch he'd forgot­ten all about it, but when he checked his phone mes­sages there was a text from Rob, which read only: ?????? Sandwich in hand, the noontime buzz of the lounge reverberating round him—food, caffeine, two pe­riods to go—he called Rob's number, but there was no answer and the message box was full. Of course. He sum­moned his brother's face, the hipster haircut, the goof-ball grin, eyes surfing the crest of some private joke—

when was he going to grow up?—then dialed Laurie at work because it came to him suddenly that they were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with one of her co-workers and her husband, whom he'd never met, and he was wondering how that might or might not interfere with the football game on TV, but she didn't answer either.

Then the day was over and he was in his car, heading to the dentist's. The drizzle had given way to a drifting haze that admitted the odd column of sunlight so that the last he saw of the school, for today at least, was a brightly lit shot of glowing white stucco and orange-tile roof rapidly dwin­dling in the rearview mirror. Traffic was light and he was 15 minutes early for the dentist, whose office was on the second floor of a vaguely Tudorish building that anchored an open-air mall—bank below, Italian restaurant with out­door seating bottom-floor left, then real estate and a sand-

wich shop and on and on all the way round the U-shaped perimeter. A patch of lawn divided the parking lot. There were the usual shrubs and a pair of long-necked palms ris­ing out of the grass to let you know you weren't in Kansas, appearances to the contrary.

He debated whether to drift over to the sandwich shop for a bite of something, but thought better of it, remember­ing the time the dentist had chastised him in a high sing­song voice because he hadn't brushed after lunch, the point of which had escaped him, since he'd been coming in to get his teeth cleaned in any case. The thought made him shift the rearview and pull back his lips in a grimace to study his gums and then work a fingernail between his front teeth, after which he took a swig of bottled water and swished it

around in his mouth before rolling down the window and spitting it out. That was just the way he was, he supposed—the kind of per­son who did what was ex­pected of him, who wanted to smooth things out and take the path of least resis­tance. Unlike Rob.

It was then that he thought of the video. He looked round him, his blood quickening, but no one was paying any atten­tion to him. The cars on either side were empty, and the only movement was at the door of the bank, where every few minutes someone would come in or out and the guard stationed there (slab-faced, heavy in the haunches, older—40, 45, it was hard to say) would ca­sually nod his head in rec­ognition. Shielding the lap­top with the back of the seat and the baffle of his own torso, he brought up the video—porn, he was watch­ing porn right there in the dentist's parking lot where anybody could see, and he wasn't thinking about stu­dents or students' parents or the rent-a-cop at the bank or the real thing ei­ther, because all at once the world had been reduced to

the dimensions of the screen on the seat beside him.

He saw an anonymous room, a bed, the incandescence of too-white flesh and the sudden thrust of bodies cohering as the scene came into focus. In the center of the bed was the woman, on all fours, the man standing behind her and work­ing at her, his eyes closed and his face drawn tight with con­centration. The woman had her head down so that her own face was hidden by the spill of her hair, red-gold hair parted in the middle and swaying rhythmically as she rocked back into him. He saw her shoulders flex and release, her fingers spread and wrists stiffen against the white field of the sheets, and then she lifted her head and he saw her face and the shock of it made something surge up and beat inside of him with a fierce sudden clangor that was like the pounding of a mallet on a steel rail. He watched as she stared into the cam­era, her eyes receding beneath (continued on page 126)

THE WAY YOU LOOK

(continued from page 84)

the weight of the moment—Laurie's eyes, his wife's—and then he slapped the screen shut. / Thought You'd Want to Know.

For a long moment he sat there fro­zen, unable to move, unable to think, the laptop like a defused bomb on the seat beside him. He wanted to look again, wanted to be sure, wanted to feel the surge of shock and fear and hate pulse through him all over again, but not now, not here. He had to get home, that was all he could think. But what of the dentist? Here he was in the parking lot, staring up at the bank of windows where Dr. Sedgwick would be bent over his current patient, finishing up with the pads and the amalgam and all the rest in anticipation of his 3:30 appoint­ment. But he couldn't face the dentist now, couldn't face anybody. He was punching in the dentist's number, the excuse already forming on his lips (food poisoning; he was right out there in the lot, but he was so sick all of a sudden he didn't think he could, or should... and maybe he'd better make another appointment?), when he became aware that there was someone standing there beside the car window. A girl. In her 20s. All made up and in a pair of tight blue pants of some shiny material that caught the light and held it as she bent to the door of the car next to his while another girl clicked the remote on the far side and the locks chirped in response. She didn't look at him, not even a glance, but she was bending over to slip some­thing off the seat, on full display, every swell and cleft and crease—inches from him, right in his face—and all at once he was so infuriated that when the dentist's secretary answered in her bland profes­sional tone he all but shouted into the phone, "I can't make it. I'm sick."

There was a pause. Then the secretary: "Who is this? Who's speaking, please?"

He pictured her, a squat woman with enormous breasts who doubled as hy-gienist and sometimes took over the sim­pler procedures when Dr. Sedgwick was busy with an emergency. "Todd," he said. "Todd Jameson?"

Another pause. "But you're the 3:30-----"

"Yeah, I know, but something's come

up. I'm sick. All of a sudden, and I-----"

The car beside him started up, the long gleaming tube of the chassis sliding back and away from him, and there was the lawn, there were the palm trees, but all he could see was Laurie, the way her fin­gers stiffened on the sheets and her eyes went on gazing into the camera but didn't register a thing.

"Our policy is for a 24-hour cancel­lation or else we have no choice but to charge you."

"I'm sick. I told you."

"I'm sorry."

The moment burst on him like one of those rogue waves at the beach and he came within a hair of shouting an obscen­ity into the receiver but he caught him­self. "I'm sorry too," he said.

At home, he found he was shaking so hard he could barely get the key in the door, and though he didn't want to, though it wasn't even four yet, he went straight to the kitchen and poured him­self a shot of the tequila they kept on hand for margaritas when people came over. He didn't bother with salt or lime but just threw it back neat and if this was the cliche—your wife has sex with another man and you go straight for the sauce—then so be it. The tequila tasted like soap. No matter. He poured an­other, downed it, and still he was trem­bling. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the laptop, clicked on Rob's e-mail and watched the video all the way through.

This time the blow was even harsher, a quick hot jolt that seared his eyes and shot through him from his fingertips to his groin. The whole thing lasted less than 60 seconds, in medias res, and what had preceded it—disrobing, a kiss, foreplay—remained hidden. The act it­self was straightforward as far as it went, no acrobatics, no oral sex, just him be­hind her and the rhythmic swaying that was as earnest and inevitable as when any two mammals went at it. Dogs. Apes. Husbands and wives. At the moment of release, she looked back at the guy doing it to her and as if at a signal rolled over and here were his knees in the frame now and his torso looming as he covered her with his own body and they kissed, their two heads bobbing briefly in the foreground before the screen went dark. The second time through, details began to emerge. The setting, for one thing. Clearly, it was a dorm room—there was the generic desk to the left of the bed, a stack of books, the swivel chair with the ghosts of their uninhabited clothes thrown over it, Levi's, a belt buckle, the silken sheen of her panties. And Laurie. This was Laurie before she'd cut her hair, before her implants, before he'd even met her. Laurie in college. Fucking.

The tequila burned in his stomach. There was no sound but for the hum of the refrigerator as it started up and clicked off again. Very gradually, the light began to swell round him as the sun searched through the haze to fill the kitchen and infuse the walls with color— a cheery daffodil yellow, the shade she'd picked out when they bought the condo two years ago on her 29th birthday. "This is the best birthday present I ever had," she'd said, her voice soft and steady, and she'd leaned in to kiss him in the lifeless office where the escrow woman sat be­hind her blocklike desk and took their signatures on one form after another as if she'd been made of steel and the factory had run out of movable parts.

They'd celebrated that night with a

bottle of champagne and dinner out and sex in their old apartment on their old bed that had come from Goodwill in a time when neither of them had a steady job. He looked round the room now— the most familiar room in the world, the place where they had breakfast together and dinner most nights, sharing the cooking and the TV news and a bottle of wine—and it seemed alien to him, as if he'd been snatched out of his life and set down here in this overbright echo­ing space with its view of blacktop and wires and the inescapable palm with its ascending pineapple ridges and ragged windblown fronds.

The next thing he knew it was five o'clock and he heard her key turn in the lock and the faint sigh of the door as she pushed it shut behind her and then the drumbeat of her heels on the glazed Saltillo tile in the front hall. "Todd?" she called. "Todd, you home?" He felt his jaws clench. He didn't answer. Her footsteps came down the hall, beating, beating. "Todd?"

He liked her in heels. Had liked her in heels, that is. She was a surgical nurse, working for a pair of plastic surgeons who'd partnered to open the San Roque Aesthetics Institute five years back, and she changed to flats while assisting at surgery but otherwise wore heels to show off her legs beneath the short skirts and calibrated tops she wore when consulting with prospective patients. "Advertising," she called it. The breast implants—about which he'd been very vocal and very pleased—had come at a discount.

He was still at the table when she walked into the kitchen, the bottle on the counter, the shot glass beside him, the laptop just barely cracked. "What's this?" she said, lifting the bottle from the counter and giving it a shake. "You're drinking?" She came across the room to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and ran it up the back of his neck, then bent for­ward to lift the empty glass to her nose and take a theatrical sniff.

"Yeah," he said, but he didn't lift his eyes.

"That's not like you. Tough day?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Well, if you're partying"—and here her voice fluted above him, light and face­tious, as if the world were still on its track and nothing had changed—"then I hope you won't mind if I pour myself a glass of wine. Do we have any wine left?" Her hand dropped away and he felt a chill on the back of his neck where her palm had been. He heard her heels tapping like typewriter keys, then the wheeze of the vacuum seal on the refrigerator door, the cabinet working on its hinges, the sharp clink as the base of the wineglass came into contact with the granite coun­ter, and finally the raucous celebratory splash of the wine. Still he didn't look up. Her attitude—this sunniness, this self-possession, this blindness and bland-ness and business-as-usual crap—savaged him. Didn't she know what was coming?

Couldn't she feel it the way animals do just before an earthquake strikes?

"That guy you used to date in college," he said, his voice choked in his throat, "what was his name?"

He looked up now and she was poised there at the counter, leaning back into it, the glass of wine—sauvignon blanc, filled to the top—glowing with reflected light. She let out a little laugh. "What brought that up?"

"What color hair did he have? Was it short, long, what?"

'Jared," she said, her eyes gone distant a moment. "Jared Reed. From NewJoisey." She lifted the glass to her lips, took a sip, the gold chain she wore at her throat pick­ing up the light now too. She was wearing a blue silk blouse open to the third but­ton down. She put a hand there, to her collarbone. Sipped again. "I don't know," she said. "Brown. Black, maybe? He wore it short, like Justin Timberlake. But why? Don't tell me you're jealous"—the face-

tious note again when all he could think of was leaping up from the table and slap­ping every shred of facetiousness out of her—"after all these years? Is that it? I mean, what do you care?"

"Rob sent me a video today."

"Rob?"

"My brother. Remember my brother? Rob?" His voice got away from him. He hadn't meant to shout, hadn't meant to be accusatory or confrontational—he just wanted answers, that was all.

She said nothing. Her face was cold, her eyes colder still.

"Maybe"—and here he flipped open the laptop—"maybe you ought to have a look at it and then you tell me what it is." He was up out of the chair now, the tequila pitching him forward, and he didn't care about the look on her face or the way she cradled the wine and held out her hands to him and he didn't touch her—wouldn't touch her, wouldn't touch her ever again. The kitchen door was a slab of nothing,

but it slammed behind him and the whole house shook under the weight of it.

Later, as faces wheeled round him and the flatscreen TV behind the bar blinked and shifted over the game that was utterly meaningless to him now, he had the lei­sure to let his mind go free. School didn't exist—lesson plans, papers to grade, none of it. Laurie didn't exist either. And Jared Reed was just a ghost. And whether he had brown hair or black or muscles on top of muscles or a dick two feet long, it didn't matter because he was just a ghost on a screen. Nothing. He was nothing. Less than nothing.

But here was the bartender (30s, with a haircut like Rob's and dressed in a cowboy shirt with embroidery round the pockets like icing on a cake) looming over him with the Jameson bottle held aloft. "Yeah," he said, and he would have clarified by adding, Hit me again, but that would have been too much like being in a movie, a bad movie, bad and sad and pathetic. He wasn't a drinker, not really, and he hadn't wanted the tequila except that it was there because they didn't keep anything in the house beyond that and a couple bottles of wine they got when it was on sale, but when they went out, he always ordered Jameson. Jameson was all he ever drank, aside from maybe a beer chaser, which he wasn't having tonight, definitely wasn't having. Rob drank it too. And their father, when he was alive. It was a family tradition, and how many times had they sat at din­ner when they were kids and their father would say. Just wait till old man Jameson kicks off, then we'll be rich, and they would chime, Who's Jameson?, and he'd say, Who's Jame­son? The Whiskey King, of course. And their mother: Don't hold your breath.

And then the drink was there and he was sipping it, thinking of the last thing Rob had sent him as an attachment, and when was it? A week ago? Two? It was an article he'd downloaded from some obscure web­site and he'd forwarded it under the head­ing, Look What Our Glorious Ancestor Was Up To. The ancestor in question—if he was an ancestor, of course, and there was the joke—was James Jameson, heir to the whis­key fortune. In 1888 Jameson was 31 years old, same age as Todd was now, and he was a wastrel and an adventurer, and because he was limp with boredom and had done all the damage he could in the clubs and parlors of Ireland, England and the Con­tinent, he signed on for an African expedi­tion under Henry Morton Stanley, of Liv­ingstone fame. They were in the Congo, in the heart of the heart of darkness, stuck on some river Todd had forgotten the name of though he'd read the article over and over with a kind of sick fascination—stuck there and going nowhere. One morning when Stanley was away from camp, Jameson got the idea that he might like to visit one of the cannibal tribes to see how they went about their business and make a record of it in his sketchbook. From the beginning of the expedition, he'd made detailed draw­ings of tribesmen, game animals, erratic vegetation and crude villages scattered

along the banks of the rivers, and now he was going to draw cannibals. At work. For six handkerchiefs—not a dozen or two doz­en, just six—he bought a 10-year-old slave girl and gave her as a gift to the cannibals, then sat there on a stump or maybe a camp chair, one leg crossed over the other, and focused his concentration. He drew the figure of the girl as she was stripped and bound to a tree, drew her as the knife went in under the breastbone and sliced down­ward. She never struggled or pleaded or cried out but just stood there bearing it all till her legs gave way, and he drew that too, his hand flashing and the pencil growing duller while the mosquitoes hummed and the smoke of the cook fire rose greasily through the overhanging leaves.

Was there a theme here? Was he miss­ing something? Laurie had run out the door shouting, You don't own me! as he'd backed the car out of the drive, the win­dows up and the motor racing. And Rob had sent him the video. And the article too. Just then, a groan went up from a booth in the corner behind him and he glanced vaguely at the screen before digging out his phone and hitting Rob's number. The referee on the screen waved his arms, music pounded, the bottles behind the bar glittered in all their facets. He got a record­ing. The message box was full.

The strangest thing, the worst thing, had been those first few minutes when he had to struggle with himself to keep from bulling his way back into the kitchen to see the look on her face, to see her shame, to see tears. He'd slammed the door so hard the cheap windows vibrated in their cheap frames and one of Laurie's pictures—the silhouette of a couple on a moonlit beach he'd always hated—crashed to the floor, glass shattering on the tiles. He didn't stoop to clean it up. Didn't move, not even to shift his feet. He just stood there rigid on the other side of the door, picturing her bent over the screen, her face stricken, the wine gone sour in her throat. But then the thought came to him that maybe she liked it, maybe it turned her on, maybe she was proud of it, and that froze him inside.

When she did come through the door— and she'd had enough time to watch the thing three or four times over—she didn't look contrite or aroused or whatever else he'd expected, only angry. 'Jared is such an asshole," she hissed, glaring at him. "And so's your brother, so's Rob. What was he thinking?"

"What was he thinking? What were you thinking? You're the one on the sex tape."

"So? So what? Did you think I was a vir­gin when we got married?"

"You tell me—how many men did you have? Fifty? A hundred?"

"How many women did you have?"

"I'm not the one putting out sex tapes."

She stood her ground, tall on her heels, her face flushed and her arms folded de­fensively across her chest. "You want to know something—you're an asshole too."

If ever he was going to hit her, here was the moment. He took a step toward her. She never even flinched.

"Listen, Todd, I swear I didn't know that creep was making a video—he must

have had a hidden camera going or some­thing, I don't know. I was in college. He was my boyfriend."

"What about the lights?"

She shrugged. An abortive smile flick­ered across her lips. "He always liked to do it with the lights on. He said it was sexier that way. He was an artist, I told you that, really visual-----"

Everybody had past lovers, of course they did, but they were conveniently re­duced to shadows, memories, a photo or two, not this, not this hurtful flashing res­urrection in the flesh, the past come home in living color. An artist. All he knew was that he hated her in that moment.

"How was I to know? Really, I'm sorry, I am. To put that tape up—where is it, on the net somewhere?—I mean it's really dis­gusting and stupid. He's a shit, a real shit."

"You're the shit," he said. "You're disgusting."

"I can't believe you. I mean, really— what does it have to do with you?"

"You're my wife."

"It's my body."

"Yeah? Well, you can have it. I'm out of here."

And that was when she chased him down the drive and put on a show for the neighbors, her voice honed to a shriek like something out of the bell of an instrument, a clarinet, an oboe, abuse of the reed, the pads: You don't own me!

It was getting late. The game was over, long over, and he was sitting there in a kind of delirium, waiting for his phone to ring, waiting for Rob—or maybe her, maybe she'd call and pour her soul out to him and they could go back to the way they were before—when he noticed the couple sitting at the end of the bar. They were kissing, long and slow, clinging fast to one another as if they were out in a windstorm, as if all the contravening forces of the uni­verse were trying to tear them apart, two untouched drinks standing sentinel on the bar before them and the bartender in his cowboy shirt steering round them as he poured and wiped and polished. The girl's arms were bare, her jacket—blue suede, with a fake-fur collar—draped over the chair behind her. He couldn't see her face, only the back of her head, her shoulders, her arms, beautiful arms, stunning actu­ally, every muscle and tendon gently flexed to hold her lover to her, and he looked till he had to look away.

He became aware of the music then, some syrupy love song seeping out of the speakers, and what was it? Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart at his worst, hyperinflated love delivered in a whisper, as manufac­tured as a pair of shoes or a box of dough­nuts, and here was this couple sucking the breath out of one another, and what was he doing here, what was he thinking? He was drunk, that was what it was. And he hadn't had anything to eat, had he? Eating was important. Vital. He had to eat, had to put something in his stomach to absorb the alcohol—how else could he get behind the wheel? Drunken driving on top of every­thing else. He pictured it: the cuffs, the cell,

his corner in the teachers' lounge deserted and Ed Jacobsen, the principal, wondering where he was—not a phone call? Couldn't he even have called?

The thought propelled him up off the stool, down the length of the bar past the stupefied sports fans and the clinging couple and the bartender with the haircut like Rob's, You have a good night now, and out onto the street. He stood there a moment outside the door, patting down his pockets, wallet, keys, cell phone, taking stock. The air was dense and moist, fog working its way up the streets as if the streets were rivers and the fog a thing you could float on. He could smell the ocean, the rankness of it. He thought he'd go to the next place, get a burger and coffee, black coffee—wasn't that how it was done? Wasn't that taking the cliche full circle? That was how it had been in college after he'd gone out cruising the bars with his dorm mates, lonely, aching, repressed, gaping at the girls as they took command of the dance floor and never knowing what to do about it. A burger. Black coffee.

He started down the street, everything vague before him, trying to think where to go, who would be open at this hour. Things glittered in the half-light, the pavement wet, trash strewn at the curbs. A single car eased down the street, headlights muted, taillights bleeding out into the night. He made a left on the main street, heading toward a place he thought might be open still, a place he and Laurie sometimes went to after a late movie, focused now, or as focused as he could be considering the whiskey and the hammer beating inside him, reverberating still, when a woman's voice cut through the night. She was cursing, her delivery harsh, guttural, as if the words were being torn from her, and then there was the wet clap of flesh on flesh and a man's voice, cursing back at her— figures there, contending in the shadows.

He wanted to call out, wanted to defy them, bark at them, split them apart, get angry, get furious—there they were, just ahead of him, the woman lurching into the man, the man's arms in dark rapid motion, their curses propulsive, shoes shuffling on the concrete in a metastasized dance—but he didn't. There was a suspended moment when they felt him there and they switched it off, in league against him, and then he was past them, his footsteps echoing and the curses starting up behind him in a low seething growl of antipathy.

How he made it home he couldn't say, but he remembered standing at the door of the car fumbling with his keys on a street so dark it might as well have been underground and feeling the cell buzz in his pocket. Or thinking he felt it. He kept it on vibrate because of teaching, because of class—the embarrassment factor—but half the time he never felt it there against his skin and wound up missing his calls. Which was why he had to check messages all the time...but it was buzzing and he had it in his hand and flipped it open, the only light on the street and a dim light at that. Rob. Rob calling.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Todd, hey, bro—you okay? I mean

I been calling for like three hours now and I'm worried about you, because I mean, it's tough, I know, but it's not like the end of the world or anything-----"

"Rob," he said, his voice ground down so that he barely recognized it himself. "Rob, can you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah, I can hear you."

"Good. Because screw you. That's my message: Screw you." And then he turned the phone off and thrust it deep in his pocket.

When he came in the door the house was silent. There was a lamp on in the hallway and the night-light in the kitchen was on too, but Laurie, in her meticulous way, had turned off all the rest and gone to bed. Or so it seemed. He moved slowly, heavily, his breath coming hard and his feet working as if independent of him, far away, down there in the shadows where the baseboard ran the length of the hall and conjoined with the frame of the bedroom door. If she had a light on in there—if she was up, waiting for him, waiting for what came next—he would have seen it in the crack at the bottom of the door, the tile uneven there, treacherous even, shoddy workmanship like everything else in the place. Very slowly, he turned the handle and eased the door open, wincing at the metallic protest of the hinges that needed a shot of WD-40, definitely needed WD-40, and then he was in the room and looking down at the shadow of her where she lay in bed, on her side, her back to him. It took him a moment to see her there, his eyes adjusting to the dark and the stripes of pale trembling light the streetlamp outside the window forced through the shades, but very gradually she began to take on shape and presence. Laurie. His wife.

He saw the way she'd tucked her shoulder beneath her, saw the rise there, the declivity of her waist and the sharp definition of her upthrust hip. He'd always loved her hips. And her legs. The indentation of her knees. The way she walked as if carrying a very special prize for someone she hadn't quite discovered yet. He was remembering the first time he'd ever seen her, a hot summer day with the sun arching overhead and her walking toward him with a guy from school he liked to hang out with on weekends, and he didn't know a thing about her, didn't know her name or where she came from or that they liked the same books and bands and movies or that her whole being would open up to his and his to hers as if they had the same key and the key fit just exactly right. What he saw was the sun behind her and the shape of her revealed in silhouette, all form and grace and the light like poured gold. What he saw was the sway of her hips against the fierce brightness of the sun and the shadow of her legs caught in the grip of a long diaphanous dress, her legs, sweet and firm and purposeful, coming toward him.

He remembered that. Held that vision. And then, as quietly as he could, he pulled back the covers and got into bed beside her.

HE SAW AN ANONYMOUS ROOM.

A DED. THE INCANDESCENCE OF TOO-WHITE FLESH AND

THE SUDDEN THRUST OF BODIES

COHERING AS THE SCENE

CAME INTO FOCUS.