Other Earths Part 19

"I pick up languages quickly. One of my many gifts." She gave another lopsided smile. "I do have some bad habits I should mention. I tend to run on about things. Talk too much. Just tell me to stuff it. People have been telling me that since I was a child. And I'm a vegetarian, though I have been known to eat fish. I'm picky about what I consume."

"My cook's big on veggies," I said. "Too much so for my tastes."

"You have a cook?"

"A Vietnamese kid. Deng. He's crew and cook. The pilot's an old guy in his sixties. Lan. He speaks decent American, but he doesn't talk to me much . . . not so far, anyway."

"La-de-da!" said Lucy. "Next you'll be telling me you have your own private ocean."

A breeze stirred the placid surface of the river, but it had no effect on the humidity in the restaurant.

"There's one thing more," Lucy said. "I'm afraid it may erase whatever good opinion you've formed of me, but I can't compromise. I smoke two pipes of opium a day. One at noon, and one before sleeping. Sometimes more, if the quality's not good." She paused and, a glum note in her voice, said, "The quality is usually good in these parts."

"You have an adequate supply on hand?"

She seemed surprised by this response, unaware that her confession had put her into the lead for the job. "I've enough for the week, I think."

"Is opium the actual reason you want to extend your trip?" I asked.

"It's part of it. I won't lie to you. I recognize I'll have to quit before I return to London. But it's not the main reason."

Another backpacker, a short woman with frizzy blond hair, entered and, after peering about, approached the bartender. I signaled him to send her away. Lucy pretended not to notice.

"Would you like to see the boat?" I asked.

An alarmed look crossed her face, and I thought that this must be a major step for her, that despite her worldliness she was not accustomed to giving her trust so freely. But then she smiled and nodded vigorously.

"Yes, please," she said.

The sun was beginning to set as I rowed out to the Undine Undine, moored some thirty yards from sh.o.r.e. A high bank of solid-looking bluish gray cloud rose from the eastern horizon, its leading edge ruffled and fluted like that of an immense seash.e.l.l, a G.o.dly mollusk dominating the sky; fragments of dirty pink cloud drifted beneath, resembling frayed morsels of flesh that might have been torn from the creature that once inhabited the sh.e.l.l, floating in an aqua medium. The river had turned slate colored, and the houseboat, with its cabin of varnished, unpainted boards and the devilish eyes painted on the bow to keep spirits at bay, looked surreal from a distance, like a new home uprooted and set adrift on a native barge, its perfect, watery reflection an impressionist trick. Lan sat cross-legged in the bow. So unchanging was his expression, his wizened features appeared carved from tawny wood, his gray thatch of hair lifting in the breeze. Deng, a cheerful, handsome teenager clad in a pair of shorts, scrambled to a.s.sist us and lashed the dinghy to the rail. He exchanged a few words in Vietnamese with Lucy and then asked if we were hungry.

The same breeze that had not had the slightest effect at the bar here drove off the mosquitoes and refreshed the air. We sat in the stern, watching the sunset spread pinks and mauves and reds across the enormous sky, staining hierarchies of c.u.mulus that pa.s.sed to the south. The lights of Stung Treng, white and yellow, beaded the dusky sh.o.r.e. I heard strains of music, the revving of an engine. Deng brought plates of fish and a kind of ratatouille, and we ate and talked about the French in Southeast Asia, about America's benighted president ("A grocer's clerk run amok," Lucy said of him), about writing and idiot urban planners and Borneo, where she had recently been. She had an edge to her personality, this perhaps due to working with wealthy and eccentric clients, rock stars and actors and such; yet there was a softness underlying that edge, a genteel quality I responded to, possibly because it reminded me of Kim . . . though this quality in Lucy seemed less a product of repression.

Deng took our plates, and Lucy asked if I had anyone back in the States, a wife or girlfriend. I told her about Kim and said she might meet me in Saigon.

"I suppose that's where I would leave you," she said. "a.s.suming you deem me suitable." Her mouth thinned. "I probably shouldn't put this out there, because whenever I show enthusiasm, you become reticent. But this is so wonderful." Lucy's gesture embraced the world as seen from the deck of the Undine Undine. "In order to get rid of me, you may have to throw me overboard." She sat forward in the deck chair. "What are you thinking about?"

I saw no reason to delay-the prospect of spending another day at the Sekong was not an engaging one. "Welcome aboard," I said.

"Oh, gos.h.!.+" She pushed up from the chair and gave me a peck on the lips. "That's marvelous. Thanks so much."

We went inside, and I showed her the shower, the galley, and the king-size bed; then I left her to wash up and stood looking out over the river, listening to the loopy cries of lizards, alerted now and again by the plop of a fish. Night had swallowed all but the lights on the sh.o.r.e, and I could no longer make out Lan in the bow. Deng sat on the roof, legs dangling, reading a comic by lantern light. I felt on the brink of something ineluctable and strange, and I suspected it had to do more with Lucy than with the voyage. Kim's caution notwithstanding, I antic.i.p.ated losing a piece of my soul to this forthright, tomboyish, opium woman. When I went back down, I found her on the bed, her legs stretched out, toweling her hair, wearing only a pair of panties. It looked as if two-thirds of her length were in her legs. Bikini lines demarked her small, pale b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A bra.s.s box of some antiquity rested on the sheets beside her.

She came out from beneath the towel and caught me staring. "I know," she said. "I'm revoltingly thin. I look better when I've put on five or six pounds, but I can't keep weight on when I'm traveling."

"You know that's bulls.h.i.+t," I said. "You look great. Beautiful."

"I'm scarcely beautiful, but I do have good legs. At least so I've been told." She stared at her legs, pursed her lips as if reappraising them; then she said, "I came all the way from Vientiane today, and I'm exhausted. So if you don't mind, I'll indulge my filthy habit earlier than usual this evening." She patted the box. "It's awfully bright in here. Can something be done?"

I joined her on the bed, switched on a reading lamp, and cut the overheads.

"Much better," she said.

She opened the box, removed a long pipe of wood and bra.s.s, and unwrapped yellowish paper from a pressed cake of black opium.

"I'll be completely useless once I've smoked," she said. "However, you may touch me if you like. I enjoy being touched when I'm high."

I asked if she would be aware of what was going on. "Mmm-hmm. I may act as though I'm not, but I know."

"Where do you like to be touched?"

"Wherever you wish. My b.r.e.a.s.t.s, my a.s.s." She glanced up from her preparations. "My p.u.s.s.y. Go lightly there, if you will. Too much stimulation confuses things in here." She tapped her temple.

She pinched off a fragment of opium and began rolling it into a pellet, frowning in concentration; her hands and wrists were fully illuminated, but the rest of her body was sheathed in dimness; she might have been a trim young witch up to no good purpose, drenched in the shadow cast by her spell, preparing a special poison that required a measure of light for efficacy. She plumped the pillows, making a nest, and lay on her side.

"Kiss, please," she said.

Her lips parted and her tongue flirted with mine. She settled into the pillows and lit the pipe, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked in smoke. She relit the pipe three times, and after the last time, she could barely hold it. After watching her drowse a minute, I stripped off my clothes and lay facing her, caressing her hip, tasting the chewy plug of a nipple. Her eyes were slitted, and I couldn't tell if she was focusing on me, yet when my erection prodded her thigh, she made an approving noise. I slipped a hand under her panties, rested the heel of it on her pubic bone, thatched with dark hair, and let the weight of one finger come down onto her l.a.b.i.a. The intimacy of the touch seemed to distress her, so I reluctantly withdrew the finger, but I continued to touch her intimately. Holding her that way became torture.

"Lucy?" I whispered.

She didn't appear to be at home. Her breathing was shallow; a faint sheen of sweat polished her brow. I had no choice but to relieve the torment as best I could.

I hadn't thought that I could take such pleasure from fondling a nearly comatose woman. The thought that she was submitting to me had been exciting. I had walled off such practices from my s.e.xual life, yet I now found myself imagining variations on the act, and I believed that Lucy would be a willing partner to my fantasies. The woman I'd met in the bar had, over the course of a few hours, been transformed into a practicing submissive. I had known other women to exhibit a manner markedly different from that they later presented, women who, upon feeling secure in the situation, had changed as abruptly as Lucy. But Cradle Two's rice-paper model was in my head, people shunting back and forth between universes without realizing it, and I thought if I could see those women now, I would view their sudden transformation in a new light, and I speculated that this Lucy might not be the same who had climbed into the dinghy with me. One way or another, I had presumed her to be a normal, bright woman who had survived a shattering blow, but it was evident that she had picked up a kink or two along the road to recovery.

In the morning I woke to a drowned gray light, the cabin windows spotted with rain. Lucy was sitting up in bed, inspecting her stomach.

"I'm all sticky," she said, and gave me a sly smile. "You were wicked, weren't you?"

"Don't you remember?"

She gave the matter some study, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face, as might a child, into a mask of exaggerated perplexity. "It's a little hazy. I definitely remember you touching me." She scooted down beneath the sheets, snuggling close. "It made for a decent icebreaker, don't you think? There'll be less reason for nerves when we make love."

"Now you mention it, I doubt there'll be any." I clasped my hands behind my neck. "Last night was surprising to me."

"A sophisticate like you? I wouldn't have believed it possible to surprise you."

I caught her by the hair and pulled her head away from my chest, irritated by the remark. Judging by her calm face, she didn't mind the rough treatment, and I tightened my grip.

"I wasn't mocking you," she said. "I'm your admirer. Honest. Cross my heart and spit on the pope."

I released her, astonished by the behavior she had brought out in me. She flung a leg across my waist, rubbing against me, letting me feel the heated damp of her.

"Would you care to see another of my tricks?" she asked.

"What do you have?"

"Oh, I've got scads." She folded her arms on my chest, rested her chin upon them, and gazed at me soberly. "You'd be surprised, I mean really, really . . . really really surprised, how wicked I can be." surprised, how wicked I can be."

Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same pa.s.sions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat-there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television.

The landscape, too, bored me. Like every river, the Mekong was a mighty water dragon, its scales s.h.i.+fting in hue from blue to green to brown, sometimes overflowing its banks, and along the sh.o.r.e were floating markets, a.s.semblies of weathered gray shanties resting upon leaky bottoms that were not much different from shacks on the Mississippi or huts along the Nile or the disastrous slums of Quito spilling into the Guayas, fouling it with their wastes . . . and so I did not delight, as travelers will, in the scenting of an unfamiliar odor, because I suspected it to be the register of spoilage, and I derived no great pleasure from the dull green uniformity sliding past or in the sentinel presence of coconut palms, their fronds drooping against a yellow morning sky, or the toil of farmers (though one morning, when we pa.s.sed a village where people were was.h.i.+ng their cows in the river, I felt a twinge of interest, remarking on the possible linkage between this practice and the Sat.u.r.day morning ritual of was.h.i.+ng one's car in a suburban driveway). Neither did I have the urge to scribble excitedly in my journal about the quaint old fart who sold Lucy a bauble in a floating market and told a story in pidgin English about demons and witches, oh my! Nor did I, as might an ecotourist in his blog for true believers, fly my aquatic mammal flag at half-mast and rant about the plight of the Irrawaddy dolphins (yet another dying species) that surfaced from muddy pools near the town of Kratie. And I did not exult, like some daft birder, in the soaring river terns and kingfishers that dive-bombed the waters farther south. I was solely interested in Lucy, and my interest in her was limited.

Within a week we had developed an extensive s.e.xual vocabulary, and though it stopped short of sea urchins and safety pins, we were depraved in our invention-that was how I might have characterized it before embarking upon the relations.h.i.+p, though I came to hold a more liberated view. Depravity always incorporates obsession, but our obsession had a scholarly air. We were less possessed lovers than anthropologists studying one another's culture, and because we made no emotional commitment, our pa.s.sion manifested as a scientific voyeurism that allowed us to explore the scope of actual perversity with greater freedom than would have been the case if our hearts were at risk. We approached each other with coolness and calculation. "Do you like this?" one of us would ask, and if the answer was no, we would move on without injured feelings to a new pleasurable possibility. Apart from badinage, we talked rarely, and when not physically involved, we went away from each other, she to craft her business plan, sketching and writing lists, and I to sit in the stern and indulge in a bout of self-loathing and meditate on pa.s.sages from The Tea Forest The Tea Forest that reflected upon my situation. Five days on the Mekong had worked a change in me that I could not comprehend except in terms of Cradle Two's novel. Indeed, I lost much of the urge to comprehend it, satisfied to brood and f.u.c.k my way south. I felt something festering inside me, some old bitterness metastasizing, sprouting black claws that dug into my vitals, encouraging me to lash out; yet I had no suitable target. I yelled at Deng on occasion, at Lan less frequently (I had grown to appreciate his indifference to me); but these were petty irritations that didn't qualify for a full release, and so I lashed out against myself. that reflected upon my situation. Five days on the Mekong had worked a change in me that I could not comprehend except in terms of Cradle Two's novel. Indeed, I lost much of the urge to comprehend it, satisfied to brood and f.u.c.k my way south. I felt something festering inside me, some old bitterness metastasizing, sprouting black claws that dug into my vitals, encouraging me to lash out; yet I had no suitable target. I yelled at Deng on occasion, at Lan less frequently (I had grown to appreciate his indifference to me); but these were petty irritations that didn't qualify for a full release, and so I lashed out against myself.

Of my many failings, the most galling was that I had wasted my gifts on genre fiction. I could have achieved much more, I believed, had I not gone for the easy money but, like Cradle Two, had been faithful to my muse. Typically, I didn't count myself to blame but a.s.signed blame to the editors and agents who had counseled me, to the marketers and bean counters who had delimited me, and to the people with whom I had surrounded myself-wives and girl-friends, my fans, my friends. They had dragged me down to their level, seduced me into becoming a populist. I saw them in my mind's eye overflowing the chambers of my life, the many rooms of my mansion, all the rooms in fantasy and science fiction, all the crowded, half-imaginary party rooms clotted with people who didn't know how to party, who failed miserably at it and frowned at those few who could and did, and yearned with their whole hearts to lose control, yet lacked the necessary pa.s.sionate disposition; all the corridors of convention hotels packed with damaged, overstuffed women, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s cantilevered and contoured into shelf-like projections upon which you could rest your beer gla.s.s, women who chirped about Wicca, the Tarot, and the G.o.ddess and took the part of concubine or altar-s.l.u.t in their online role-playing games; all the semibeautiful, equally damaged, semi-professional women who believed they themselves were G.o.ddesses and concealed dangerous vibrators powered by rats' brains in their purses and believed that heaven could be ascended to from the tenth floor of the Hyatt Regency in Boston, yet rejected permanent residence there as being unrealistic; all the mad, portly men with their bald heads and beards and their eyeb.a.l.l.s in their trouser pockets, whose wives caught cancer from living with them; all the dull hustlers who blogged ceaselessly and had MacGyvered a career out of two ounces of talent, a jackknife, and a predilection for wearing funny hats, and humped the legs of their idols, who blogged ceaselessly and wore the latest fas.h.i.+on in emperor's new clothes and talked about Art as if he were a personal friend they had met through networking, networking, networking, building a fan base one reader at a time; all the lesser fantasists with their fantasies of one day becoming a famous corpse like Andre Breton and whose latest publications came to us courtesy of Squalling Hammertoe Woo Hoo Press and who squeezed out pretentious drivel from the j.e.r.k.-.o.f.f. rags wadded into their skulls that one or two Internet critics had declared works of genius, remarking on their verisimilitude, saying how much they smelled like stale e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, so raw and potent, the stuff of life itself; all the ultrasuccessful commercial novelists (I numbered myself among them) whose arrogance cast shadows more substantial than anything they had written and could afford, literally, to treat people like dirt; all the great men and women of the field (certain of them, anyway), the lifetime achievers who, in effect, pursed their lips as if about to say "Percy" or "piquant" when in public, fostering the impression that they squeezed their a.s.scheeks together extra hard to produce work of such unsurpa.s.sed grandiloquence . . . Many of these people were my friends and, as a group, when judged against the entirety of the human mob, were no pettier, no more disagreeable or daft or reprehensible. We all have such thoughts; we find solace in diminis.h.i.+ng those close to us, though usually not with so much relish. And while I kept on vilifying them, spewing my venom, I recognized they were not to blame for my deficiencies and that I was the worst of them all. I had all their faults, their neuroses, their foibles, and then some-I knew myself to be a borderline personality with sociopathic tendencies, subject to emotional and moral disconnects, yet lacking the conviction of a true sociopath. The longer I contemplated the notion, the more persuaded I was to embrace the opinion espoused in The Tea Forest The Tea Forest that Thomas Cradles everywhere were men of debased character. The peculiar thing was, I no longer took this judgment for an insult. that Thomas Cradles everywhere were men of debased character. The peculiar thing was, I no longer took this judgment for an insult.

Our fifth day on the river, Lucy scored a fresh supply of opium from a floating market, and that night, a dead-still night, hot and humid as the inside of an animal's throat, once she had prepared a pipe, she held it out to me and said, "I believe the time is right."

"No, thanks," I said.

She continued to offer the pipe, her clever face ordered by a bemused expression, like a mother forcing her infant son to try a new food, one she knows he will enjoy.

"I've smoked pot," I said. "But I don't know about this."

"I promise you, you'll have a grand old time. And it'll help with the heat."

I took the pipe. "What do I do?"

"When I light the pipe, draw gently on it. You mustn't inhale deeply, just enough to guide the smoke."

It was as she said. Once guided, the smoke seemed to find its own way, plating my throat and lungs with coolness and enforcing a dizzy, drifty feeling. I lost track of what Lucy was doing, but I think she, too, smoked. We lay facing one another, and I became fascinated by the skin on her lower abdomen, pale and, due to shaving, more coa.r.s.ely grained than the rest. My limbs were heavy, but I managed to extend a forefinger and touch her. The contact was so profound, I had to close my eyes in order to absorb the sensations of warmth and softness and muscularity. With effort, because I had little strength and not much volition, I succeeded in slitting my eyes, focusing on an inch of skin higher up, a tanned, curving place. My focus narrowed until I appeared to be looking at a minute fraction of her whole, a single tanned atom, and then I penetrated that atom and was immersed in a dream, something to do with a lady swimming in a pool floored by a huge white lotus, its petals lifted by gentle currents, and an anthropomorphic beast with the head of a mastiff who ate c.o.c.kroaches, pinching off their heads, draining them of a minim of syrupy fluid that he chased with diamonds, grabbing a handful from a bowl at his elbow and crunching them like peanuts, a fabulous adventure that was interrupted, cut off as if the channel had been switched, and replaced by the image of a night sky into which I was ascending.

The lights in the sky appeared scattered at first but grew brighter and increasingly unified, proving to be the visible effulgence of a single creature. It was golden-white in color and many chambered, reminding me of those spectacular, luminous phantoms that range the Mindanao Trench, frail complexities surviving at depths that would crush a man in an instant; yet it was so vast, I could not have described its shape, only that it was huge and golden-white and many chambered. Its movements were slow and oceanic, a segment of the creature lifting, as though upon a tide, and then an adjacent segment lifting as the first fell, creating a rippling effect that spread across its length and breadth. All around me, black splinters were rising toward the thing, sinister forms marked by a crookedness, like hooked thorns. Dark patches formed on its surface, composed of thousands of these splinters, and it began to shrink, its chambers collapsing one into the other like the folds of an accordion being compressed. Unnerved, I tried to slow my ascent, and as I twisted and turned, flinging myself about, I glimpsed what lay behind me: a black, depthless void picked out by a single, irregular gray shape, roughly circular and, from my perspective, about the size of a throw rug. The gray thing made me nervous. I looked away, but that did nothing to ease my anxiety, and for the duration of my dream-hours, it seemed-I continued my ascent, desperate to stop, my mind clenched with fear. When I woke near first light, my heart hammered and I was covered in sweat. I recalled the mural in Stung Treng, noting the crude resemblance it bore to the glowing creature, but a more pressing matter was foremost in my thoughts.

I put my hand on Lucy's throat and shook her. She felt the pressure of my grip. Her eyes fluttered open, widened; then she said, "Is this to be something new?"

"What did you give me last night?" I asked. "It wasn't opium."

"Yes, it was!"

"I've never seen a record of anything like what I experienced."

"Not everything is written down, Tom." She moved my hand from her throat. "You're so very excitable. Tell me about it."

I summarized my evening and she said, "You may have had some sort of reaction. I doubt it will reoccur."

"I'm not smoking that s.h.i.+t again."

"Of course you won't." She sat up. "But to more pressing business. I may get my period today-I'm feeling crampy. So, if you want to get one in before the curse is upon me, this morning would be the time."

Lan had his work cut out for him. North of Kampong Cham, the Mekong was more than a mile wide, but ma.s.sive dry-season sandbars rendered the river almost impa.s.sable. Often there was a single navigable channel and that had to be located, so we went more slowly than usual, with Deng going on ahead of the Undine Undine in the dinghy, taking soundings. To break the monotony, we camped one night on an island where we found driftwood caught in the limbs of trees fifteen and twenty feet high, pointing up the dramatic difference in water level between the rainy season and the dry. We erected a tentlike structure of mosquito netting and lounged beneath it, drinking gin and watching a strangely monochromatic sunset bronze the western sky, resolving into a pageantry of yellows and browns. Deng cooked over an open fire on the beach, preparing a curry. As darkness closed down around us, there was an explosion of moths, nearly hiding him from view (we glimpsed him squatting by the fire, a shamanic figure occulted by flurrying wings), and when he brought the curry to us, what was supposed to be a vegetarian dish had been thickened by uncountable numbers of moths. Lucy had a nibble and declared it to be: "Not bad. They give it kind of a meaty flavor." I had been incredibly careful about food since arriving in Asia, wanting to spare myself the misery of stomach problems, but I was hungry and stuffed myself. in the dinghy, taking soundings. To break the monotony, we camped one night on an island where we found driftwood caught in the limbs of trees fifteen and twenty feet high, pointing up the dramatic difference in water level between the rainy season and the dry. We erected a tentlike structure of mosquito netting and lounged beneath it, drinking gin and watching a strangely monochromatic sunset bronze the western sky, resolving into a pageantry of yellows and browns. Deng cooked over an open fire on the beach, preparing a curry. As darkness closed down around us, there was an explosion of moths, nearly hiding him from view (we glimpsed him squatting by the fire, a shamanic figure occulted by flurrying wings), and when he brought the curry to us, what was supposed to be a vegetarian dish had been thickened by uncountable numbers of moths. Lucy had a nibble and declared it to be: "Not bad. They give it kind of a meaty flavor." I had been incredibly careful about food since arriving in Asia, wanting to spare myself the misery of stomach problems, but I was hungry and stuffed myself.

The following morning I was stricken with severe diarrhea. I blamed the moths and Deng. He kept out of my way for the next two days. On the third day, while resting in the stern, I caught sight of him on the island helping Lucy fly a kite, and then, later that afternoon, I saw him sneaking into our cabin. Thinking he might be stealing, hoping for it, in fact (I was feeling better and wanted an excuse to exercise my temper), I went inside. Lucy was sitting on the bed, leaning toward Deng, whose back was to me. He appeared to be fumbling with his shorts. I shouted, and after tossing me a terrified glance over his shoulder, he bolted for the door.

"What the f.u.c.k's going on?" I asked.

"For G.o.d's sake," Lucy said. "Don't act so wronged."

I was taken aback by her mild reaction-I had expected a denial.

"I took pity on him," she said. "There's no reason for you to be upset."

"You felt bad, so you were going to blow him?" She frowned. "If you must know, I was going to manipulate him."

"A hand job? Oh, well. If I'd known that's all it was . . . s.h.i.+t. My mom used to give the paperboy hand jobs. Dad would look on and beam."

She gave me a defiant look.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You don't see you did anything wrong?"

We held a staring contest, and then she said, "Can you imagine being sixteen, trapped on a boat with people who're having s.e.x as much as we do? He was pathetic, really."

"So he came to you and asked for a hand job? And you said, 'Oh, Deng, soulful child of the Third World . . . ' "

"He asked for considerably more than that. I told him it was all I could manage." She crossed her legs and gazed out at the river. "Since we've been going at it, I've had an almost ec.u.menical att.i.tude toward s.e.x. It's not as though we're in love, yet that's the feeling I get when I'm in love. It makes me wonder if I've ever been in love."

"Ec.u.menical? You mean like you want to spread it around?"

"That's one way of putting it," she said frostily.

"I don't want you to feel that way. I'm territorial in the extreme."

"Yes, I'm beginning to grasp that." She stretched out on the bed, placed her hand on a paperback that lay open beside her. "It won't happen again."

I sat next to her on the edge of the bed. "Is that all you have to say?"

"Do you want an apology? I apologize. I should have known it would distress you." She waited for me to respond and then said, "Should I leave? I'd rather not, but it's your boat. If you're determined to view what I've done as a betrayal . . ."

"No, I'm just confused."

"About what?"

"About your att.i.tude . . . and mine. I don't understand why I'm not angrier."

"Look," she said. "Do you really believe I'm seeking another s.e.xual outlet? That I'm not getting enough? Nymphomaniacs don't get this much."