just because he was dark. He kept all his hatred, cupped it inside himself as if it was something precious he refused to share with the world.
“Pretty,” she whispered.
“Huh?”
“You're so pretty.”
He grunted, in boredom or disdain. He kept her words, scraps of ribbon he'd hold forever inside his skull. She held on the way she'd taught herself to, with invisible hands that embraced her insides. You could flip if you let yourself count your losses and your human flaws.
“You're beautiful,” she said. Just let it go. Just don't worry about what gets kept and what's returned. “You have the most fantastic cock I've ever seen on a man.”
He chuckled, as a parent would over the rampaging enthusiasms of a child. “The Negra is famous for his physical endowment,” Levon said. “Explorers to the dark continent sometimes brought them back as curiosities. It ain't personal. It's a African thing.”
“I might love you,” she said. “What would happen if that was true?”
He grunted again, ran the palm of his hand up her thigh. Outside, a dove called. Ants crawled busily over the trees that stood among the old graves, the battered brown hulks of the buildings.
“Listen,” she said. “Maybe we should sleep a little.”
“Mmm.”
She reached into the crate beside the mattress, shook two reds out of a crystal bottle. “Let's just sleep a little,” she said, handing him one.
“Yeah,” he murmured, swallowing the pill. “Sleep and dream.”
She swallowed her own pill and waited for the gray lull, the gloved feeling. Levon breathed beside her, eyes closed, though he couldn't be asleep that quickly. She touched him, lightly, with a fingertip, on his forehead, chest, and belly, as if looking for the button. The mechanism that would spring it all open. She wanted what he wouldn't give her. His childhood, his fears. His explanations. He was not unkind but he lived in his own country. She could only learn the rules by breaking them. In Levon's country, compliments were insults and stories were lies. Of all human sounds, only music carried no hidden taint of defeat or domination.
What worried Zoe: She may in fact have sought to murder him. He was her first gentle man, her first black man, and she loved him with a hunter's ferocity. Didn't she think about putting her hands inside him? Couldn't she get herself wet by imagining biting his perfect ass, not gently but ravenously, sinking her teeth into the roundness of his cheeks, their maddening, muscular innocence? She thought of herself inhabiting Levon, scooping him out. She ran her fingers through his pubic hair and had an acid thought about Cassandra at dinner, her jaw hinged so it opened as a snake's jaw does, so she could swallow bodies nearly as large as her own. Hold on, she thought. Don't get too loose. She thought of trees dripping with snakes. She watched Levon's profile.
Yes, he would leave soon. He had never been here, not really, and he was going somewhere she couldn't follow. He dreamed in a language different from hers.
She ran her finger slowly down over her breasts to the curve of her stomach. Nothing stirred there, not yet. She thought he would leave before the child started showing itself, and she thought that was probably right. She wouldn't tell him. She didn't have the words. And, anyway, this was her child, hers alone. Levon would want to give it a name she couldn't know. He'd want to cup the child's feathery soul in his hands and add it to his own fierce inventory. She looked at him for a long time. She watched the progress of sleep on his strange, beautiful face.
She had the nameless part of him. She would keep it safe; she'd talk to it in a language that was perfect and true.
“Goodbye, lover,” she whispered. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Good night.”
Then the drug kicked in, and she followed a dream out of the room.
1982/ The evening of the day the divorce papers were signed Constantine bought a six-pack and drove out to his houses. He didn't want to see Magda. He didn't want to do anything and he didn't want to do nothing. He parked on a street, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. He waited for a sense of calm to arrive but as time passed he only found himself growing more and more irritated with the lighted windows, the little arrivals and departures, the formation of yellow ceramic ducklings lined up behind a white ceramic mother duck. Who