loveliness.
“Nothing,” I assured her for the hundredth time.
We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her
flesh did not need any more glow than it had.
“All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the
FBI, and all the others who have used you.”
“That could be a blunt book.”
“Backing down?”
“Just making an observation.”
“Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me,
sensationalism sells a book.”
I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness
and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.
The tape changed. The colored lights playing on the
walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Schehera-
zade came on, and the walls took on color again, spat-
tered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting
with crimson along the baseboard.
She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that
bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She
stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above
the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain
thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls
off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against
the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean’s agony
reached us.
I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood
next to her.
The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was
quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem
altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself
after one.
“I keep thinking of Dragonfly,” she said, her eyes up
there where it might be.
Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the
purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.
“Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?” she asked. It
was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to
cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at
the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did
that. She went on without me. “There’s all this beauty,
and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly
books, ugly news.”
By then, I was functioning. “Perhaps, in reading about
the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem
more tame by contrast, more easily lived with.”
Her lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two
separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.
“Truthfully now,” she said, “what do you think of my
books? You say you’ve read them.”
I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other
writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism
should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative
vibration they could take about their work. The last thing
I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. “Well
…”
“Truthfully,” she said, signaling me that maybe she was
tougher than the other artists I knew.
“You mean … the ugliness in them?”
“Yes. Exactly.” She turned back to the ocean. “I tried
writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It’s the
ugliness that sells.” She shrugged her shoulders. Amber
hair danced. “One must eat, mustn’t one?” Another shrug.
Another amber jitterbug.
I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.
With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines
and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own
rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me,
hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself
gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a
disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to
the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life
when I first knew what I was—and what I wasn’t.
I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh,
resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.
I took my hand away, breathless and confused.
Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding
my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in
my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the
walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could