that. We talk about the black people in Uganda and the brown people in New Guinea, and you say that we push our cultural artifacts upon them . . . You mean, medicine? You mean, TV? You mean, cars? Those people are just as smart as we are. They’d love to sit around a swimming pool and drink lemonade and listen to Eminem and get flu shots when they need them.

“You want to keep them in some kind of crazy zoo, hunting with spears, so we can look at them and study their culture. That’s bullshit. I’ve done that. I lived in a zoo, I lived in a tent when I was a kid and drank sewage and had the shits for six years in a row. I’d kill somebody to keep from going back to that. I can goddamn well guarantee if you took one of those guys out of the jungle in New Guinea and gave him some jeans and T-shirts and a good pair of shoes, he’d cut your heart out before he’d let you send him back.

“I’d bet you anything that they’d rather live in a nice apartment with a stereo and a toilet and running water that you can drink. So what I think is, you’re arguing that you have to allow the niggers to stay in their place. That’s about half a step from we gotta keep the niggers in their place. Simple racism is what it is.”

ANYWAY, HE WAS A BLUNT GUY. She wasn’t the least embarrassed by any of his blunt sexual suggestions, except for the suggestion of ignorance.

“If you’d tell me what to do, I’d do it,” she said.

“I don’t know what you want, I only know what I want. You have to tell me what to do, and I tell you what to do, and we’re both happy.”

“That sounds kind of . . . icky.”

“No, no, no,” he said, moving his index finger like a windshield wiper, a gesture she’d only seen from people who’d grown up outside the U.S. “Not icky. Icky is the wrong word. Dirty, maybe. Like Catholic dirty. Or . . . I don’t know. But not icky. Icky is like when somebody sneezes and blows snot on your croissant.”

So she started telling him what she liked.

She found out that she liked telling him.

ANY OTHER TIME, she’d have been nothing more significant than a college girl discovering sex. Not this time. This time, there was a predator hovering next to her.

She was the most vocal woman he’d ever encountered, talking, analyzing, demanding—a long-running commentary that might have been a template for an advanced version of The Joy of Sex.

All that turned him on. But what really got to him, on an emotional level, something that went beyond any simple erotic twitch, was her orgasms. They started with a growl, a sound that was almost doglike, and proceeded up in pitch and intensity until she was screaming like a cat; yowls that must have woken half the building.

If he had ever sat with her, and told her what he really felt, how he wanted to go a step beyond anything she’d ever contemplated, wanted to go there with steel and rope . . . then they’d lock him up. They’d know that he’d already been there with other women, and they’d put him next to the Gods Down the Hall, and they’d come and look at him like a goldfish in an aquarium.

But God, he’d like to talk about it; just to tell her how her howls were tearing him apart. To go just one more step with her . . .

5

LUCAS WAS HALF AWAKE when he heard the whap of the Pioneer Press hitting the front porch, and the deliverywoman reversing her car out of the driveway. Ten minutes later, as he was about to go under again, having punched his pillow flat, the second deliverywoman came in, with two whaps: the Star-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.

He tried to get back to sleep but was only marginally successful, slipping in and out of confused dreams that sometimes seemed like memories, sometimes like fantasies.

His problem was the empty bed. He’d slept by himself for years, and now, groaning through his later forties, he couldn’t sleep without Weather beside him.

On the other hand . . .

The house was certainly neater than when the family was home.

THE FAMILY WAS IN LONDON. Weather had gotten a prestigious fellowship in maxillo-facial surgery, and had first thought to go alone. But