Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,16

what I say on the radio," Gillian said.

"Reason, patience, share mutual interests – but what I say when the microphone is off is something else. I don't think the people out there in radioland are ready for what I really think."

She was reaching out her right arm to emphasize the point, and Morton Earbrow looked through one side of her net bathing suit and received a clear vision of her right breast. It seemed both soft and firm. Not like a melon perhaps, more like a pear. But then he had nothing against pears.

"The important thing" – she was still talking – "and this is what I wish I could say on the radio, is that you communicate, communicate with someone, anyone. Reach out and touch another soul. Love someone, that's the important thing. Love and be loved."

"But how?" Morton said. "Who?"

"Use your imagination," she said.

Morton timidly reached out and touched Gillian's knee. His fingers, his fingers would surely leave dust marks on her. But there was no stopping now. He slid his hardened fingers above her knee, to the flesh of her thigh. Slim but soft. He could feel her skin quiver beneath his fingers. He could feel her hand on his knee, feel her hand tightening, moving. His hand slid higher on her thigh and she moved toward him, made it easier for him.

It was then that Morton Earbrow's mechanical genius paid dividends. Without stopping to think about it, without ever having seen a blueprint, acting on instinct alone, he found the string that held her bathing suit together. It came off in three sections. Then they were touching each other in the deepest, most secret places, reaching out. Yes, by God, communicate with someone. Morton bent her beneath him and she was beyond resistance.

"I'm going to soil your couch," he remembered. "My knees and elbows, they're…."

"Kindly shut up," she said.

She had removed the belt to his Bermuda shorts and was pulling them down, down and off. And then, without more words, they merged. In the dark, in the cool darkness, they communicated. Faster and faster they communicated, harder and harder, in dozens of places, in countless ways. Fingers and nails on skin, teeth on skin, then great shudders of total communication. There were explosions of understanding, and the long drawn-out paroxysm of being as together as two people can be.

"You see," she whispered later. "That's what I meant. That's what I was trying to tell you."

"It seemed so easy…."

They came apart then and rested in the dark. Morton began to laugh and he couldn't stop.

"I'd forgotten about this," he said. "I'd forgotten there was more to life than mowing a lawn."

"There are lawns to mow and lawns to mow," she said.

"A lawn is a lawn is a lawn" – and he was laughing again. Laughing and reaching for his shorts.

"What's your hurry?" Gillian said. "The lawn can wait. That lawn can wait."

"My wife," he said. "It's afternoon and I should have started the seeding by now."

"I think you just did," Gillian said. "I'll let you go, but only if you promise to come back."

"When?"

"Almost any time," she said. "My husband hasn't been coming home much lately. Just check the driveway. If the car is here, he'll be here. If the car's away, then we can… play."

"I'm sorry about the dirt on the couch," he said.

"Never apologize," Gillian said.

There were other visits that week. There were Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. And that following Sunday afternoon, with his wife out shopping for spreading junipers, Morton lay down in his uncut crabgrass and rolled over like a puppy and felt happy to feel the cushion that was growing beneath him.

It wasn't just that the lawn never got mowed. Everything fell behind. He painted one window and didn't do the one beside it. He ordered the ceramic tile for the kitchen counter but never ordered the adhesive. He constructed half of a redwood deck and threw his hammer into Mario Vella's yard. The lawn became a field and the house was winning the fight and Morton Earbrow enjoyed the luxury of a world disintegrating around the core of his happiness.

Gloria, meanwhile, scraped the woodwork and stained it and covered it with liquid plastic. She peeled the wallpaper from the hall and put up some more. And, unsurprisingly, she could not help but notice that Morton was no longer keeping pace. She stopped making her lists because she suspected they were not even being read.

On Monday there