and the moss drifts like the hair of ancient women all the way to the ground. The whole world seems, as it did at Oak Alley, to be a dark and silent and verdant place. There wasn't any cinnamon or butter when we made love, just the two of us in the tiny little wallpapered motel cabin like it had been in the limo, and this time with the beer in the ice in the bathroom basin, and the little ruffled curtains moving in the moist current of the rattling air conditioner, we went right to the moon and the stars. Slower, sweeter, wilder, it went on all the late afternoon, the kisses and the sighs and the soft words spoken amid the battered doll-house like furniture and the light through the dirty, brittle old yellow window shades under the ruffled curtains getting more and more golden until it was dark.
Conversation about the kind of woman I always thought I'd marry: some primitive woman, deeply foreign, like the woman I'd lived with briefly in Saigon, waiting on me hand and foot, and never asking any questions, Goethe's flower girl, Gauguin's Tahitians, ah, the sadness, the hostility of it, the lockout and the despair of such ideas. I had never been stupid enough to call that a dream. She did not say anything about that. She looked adorable to me in the khaki shorts and the T-shirt and the thong sandals we'd bought in the discount mart. She wore Chantilly perfume, real cheap and sweet, that she'd bought there also, and I wanted to photograph her face, the way her face looked in the shadows, the cheekbones, the shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, the lovely pout of her red mouth. Finally she said: 'I never thought I'd get married at all. I never thought I would really love someone. I never thought ...' She sat still looking horror-struck and I felt stubborn looking at her, thinking, 'The hell, I am not going to say it again.' I was hungry. I wanted some Cajun food, real Cajun jambalaya, and shrimp and red beans. And to hear some goofy, shrill, nasal, high-pitched Cajun music and singing, maybe even find a little bar somewhere where we could dance.
'I'm going to buy that house in the Garden District,' I said. She woke up like somebody had pulled a string attached to her, as she sat there, staring off. 'It will cost a million dollars,' she said. Her eyes were glassy and strange. 'So what?' I said. We showered together and we put on more of the discount store shorts and shirts and sandals. And we were pretty much ready to go out. Then something stupid happened, well, more or less. One of those big brown horrible Louisiana roaches got into the room, and Lisa jumped up off the bed screaming, absolutely screaming, when the roach came waddling over the bumpy polyester carpet across the room. Now these are actually waterbugs or so I am told. But no one that I have ever known from Louisiana ever called them anything but roaches and just about everybody I know who was born there, with these roaches, goes screaming mad like this when they come into a room. I myself have no fear at all of roaches. So as Lisa was screaming her head off, I mean going to absolute hysteria, screaming, 'Elliott, kill it! Kill it! Kill it!' it was a great pleasure for me to go and get the thing, pick it up off the carpet in my hand, and get ready to throw it out the door. It was a damn sight better idea than smashing it, because they give off an appalling popping noise if you smash them directly, and a squashed one is worse to look at than a moving one as far as I am concerned. I don't like these things, but I don't mind picking them up. But this act of picking up the roach, catching it like a moth in my right hand, brought Lisa into a catatonic state of silence with her hands clamped over her mouth. She stared at me as if she could not believe what I was doing, and I stood still staring at her. Then she put her hands down, and white faced and sweating and shaking she said, 'Well, if it isn't the goddamned samurai himself, Mr. Macho Man, picking up the goddamn roach in his bare hand!' I don't know what