By Eric Sutherlin

"You say that morality cannot succeed from this? I beg your pardon."

Mikhail Lermontov

In early June of 1975, I was beginning to get over the twin blows of losing my long time girl friend, Linda, to another man and the normal shock of having to leave the comfort of college for the world outside. I was twenty-four years old, living in a tiny apartment in Chicago, and working as a clerk for a brokerage firm.

When I graduated I had had some vague plan of moving from the college to a small house somewhere near the school where I would lead a simple life supporting myself with odd jobs while I gradually created the paintings that would make me famous. When Linda left me that rustic daydream seemed very unattractive and so when another classmate of mine, John Norrel, who was trying to establish himself as a painter in Chicago, asked me if I wanted to share an apartment he was renting there I moved to the city. Once there I found I was unable to paint, or perhaps more accurately uninterested in painting. I couldn't say then and still can't if this was result of losing the muse of the country or the muse of lovely Linda.

About ten thirty one morning, as I was leaving the office to run some errand further down La Salle Street I was so lost in my own thoughts that I walked straight past my friend, Tony Traynor, who had to shout after me to stop.

"You got some time for a cup of coffee?" Tony asked when he finally had my attention.

"Not really," I said. "How about lunch on Thursday?"

"No. I've just got a favor to ask you anyway," he said, taking a firm grip on my arm. "Can you get me three ounces of really good stuff in a hurry?"

That surprised me. Tony's dope connections were usually far better than my own.

It amused me to realize that the two of us, standing on the sunny street in front of these stolid office building, in our business suits and our striped ties, looked just like any other pair of scheming business men, stealing a moment for a quick personal conference on the crowded sidewalk.

"I could get it from my friend Chris," I said. "It would be top grade stuff, but it's going to take a while. He lives down in southern Indiana."

"Tina said she would be glad to loan you her car this weekend."

Tony is more successful than I am at this point and I think the main reason is that he is more facile than I am at manipulating people. At first I was angry with myself for falling too easily into a position where I was doing what he wanted but it soon occurred to me that nothing would suit me better than a weekend in the country.

"It's a deal," I said. "Are you going to pay for the gas?"

"We'll split it."

"O.K.," I said. "Say, why is this so important to you? Are you dealing to your boss or something?"

He laughed and walked away. His laugh was growing more artificial the longer he stayed on La Salle Street. I wondered if something similar was happening to me. I pulled a cigar out of my pocket and walked on down the street, trying to look as important as I could. It was a beautiful summer day. In a few weeks the late July sun would turn this cavernous street into a furnace but for now everything was fine.

Early the following Saturday I found myself in Tina's little Fiat racing south along the nearly empty Dan Ryan Expressway, passing over the towering, graceful curve of the Skyway bridge, then through the depressing, sooty stretches of Gary and Hammond. Finally, after nearly an hour on the road I came to the place where the land around first opens into the flat empty order of farmland and I left the city behind for a while. Until I came to Chicago, three years before, I had lived in small towns. I was born in Iowa and I went to school in New Hampshire and southern Indiana. I love the city now with the intensity of a late convert and I dread the day when the company will transfer me away. I regard it as perverse though. What is natural to me is the slower rhythm of the country: stillness at night, being able to see a whole sky full of stars, having the ease and the time to get to know people. I love the city but when it gets to be too much I go back to the still places I knew as a child and as a student.

As the miles passed, the frenetic chatter of the morning radio began to clash with the empty serenity of the flat farmland. I thumbed through the box of tapes that Tina kept beneath the driver's seat. Between James Taylor and a pair of Cat Stevens tapes, I found one labeled in Tina's precise vertical hand - Verdi/Trotavore. Just the thing, I thought. I inserted it into the tape player and turned up the volume. I am not a real opera buff but at times nothing suits me better. I regard it as something like an infrared photo or an abstract expressionist painting. I look for no logic in it, no story. It is simply emotion rendered in sound. On that level I can enjoy it and it was the perfect thing for that morning. This opera's melodies are often stunningly beautiful although I've been told that the plot is ludicrous. I took a long drink of coffee from the thermos I had brought and felt perfectly at ease. I was in motion over familiar landscapes and expected by friends.

An hour and a half out of Gary, just north of Lafayette, Indiana, the flat land is broken by the gentle fold of a long valley running along side the Wabash River. It is the beginning of a gradual change in the land. To the south from here the land grows by steady degrees more hilly, more secretive and beautiful. The people here are not rich, because the land is not rich. The soil is heavily mixed with sand and clay and it is spread thinly over the foundation of limestone. In the places where a small stream wears through the soil it can cut quickly into the limestone below, leaving layered and pocketed gorges besides its banks - deep and beautiful scars on the land that surprise you when you find them suddenly among the flat fields. To me it seems a beautiful place, with valleys and tree topped hills. It's a fury of color in the fall. If I had not actually been happy during those years I spent in this place, I had certainly been seduced. I knew this place very well.

I reached Chris's house a little before one, Indiana time. He lived out in the country about twelve miles northwest of Bloomington on Highway 43. He owned an old farm house that sat by itself on a small rise at the south end of a long valley, overlooking rich bottom land, beside a narrow gravel road, whose junction with the highway was obscured by a bit of woods. I missed the turn the first time and backtracked slowly till at last I found the road. The gravel rattled up against the bottom of the car and I lifted a thick cloud of dust behind me. A huge sycamore tree marked the place where Chris's driveway left the dusty road. The ground around it was swirled into an eddy by the thick tangle of the tree's roots. The trunk and the lower branches were twisted and gnarled as if captured at the height of some muscle bound effort. Like a lot of other things in this part of Indiana, the tree was a little baroque for my taste, but I guess out here alone on the ridge top harmony is not necessarily a virtue. There was a row of five supple poplars to the west of the house, planted years before to provide a windbreak. On one side of the house, Chris allowed shrubs to grow thickly up to the eaves of the roof. I saw his old Volkswagen van parked half hidden by the corner of the house. That was good. Chris knew I was coming but he sometimes lost track of his own schedule. The land which had once been attached to this house had been sold or rented to farmers from further down the valley except for a couple of acres that ran down from the back of the house to a large stand of trees along what seemed to be a narrow creek. There was a white frame garage that wasn't quite large enough for a modern car. Behind it Chris had built a brick kiln to fire the ceramics he made and sold. A little further down the hill there was an old storm cellar that he used to store his work. Chris's pair of black cats were sprawled aristocratically in the shade of the porch and they regarded me coolly as I stood and let the clean air fill my lungs. I wondered if they remembered me as clearly as I remembered them.

The paint was peeling off the square posts that supported the roof and in the places where the wood showed it had whitened with the weather. A porch swing had hung there once but now all that remained was a pair of rusty hooks in the board roof. The wooden screen rattled loudly when I knocked. I waited and knocked again and finally I saw a heavy curtain move in the window and someone tapped the glass. After a couple of minutes Chris came around the side of the house. I stepped down off the porch and we shook hands and then impulsively we hugged each other and stepped back to size each other up. Chris was short and quite thin. I don't suppose he weighed more than a hundred and forty pounds but he had such a strong personality that I never thought of him as small. It was always a surprise to see him, to meet again the balance of his physical slightness and the force of his personality. He'd shaved off his beard since I had last seen him and his shoulder-length hair was now shorter than mine. It really made very little difference. Chris lived in his eyes and mouth and hands and these had not changed. He was wearing work boots and faded baggy jeans with loops and extra pockets for tools and things. His wool shirt was rolled up to his elbows to reveal tanned, wiry arms and his large hands were spotted with bits of dry gray clay.

"Sorry about the front door there. We must take precautions, you know. Come in. Come in. It's good to see you again."

He led me around the side of the house, past two white LP tanks that nestled against the house as if nursing. The view out the back was spectacular. The peaceful valley stretched out to the north.

"You've got a great place here," I said.

"Yeah, it's all right, isn't it. I spent months and months searching for this place. I own it, you know. Land outright. The poor farmer couldn't quite accept it when I put it up in cash. I told him a story about a rich uncle or something. What about you? Are you still living with Norrel?"

"No, we didn't get along very well after a while so I got a place of my own in the same neighborhood."

"I didn't think that would work out. You two were both too competitive. You see a lot of our old friends up there?"

"A few people. Mostly the sort of people we used to make fun of. I saw Melissa for a while but not lately. What about you? Does this place still draw the old crowd?

"No, not so much as before. Some people are starting to get respectable. I see Gregory Fellows all the time of course and Toby comes around every couple of weeks. Larry Thomas still comes by. We do a lot of business. He's fallen in love with Terry Snider."

"The girl who had bad dreams?"

"Yeah. They're a beautiful couple. All Larry really wanted was someone to soothe. Very sensitive guy."

Chris put both hands up to lightly touch his hair. "You like the new do? You inspired me. I thought I might try to see what it is like to be respectable.

"It's you," I said.

"Well, that remains to be seen. It's certainly different. I saw the reviews of Norrel's latest show in Art News."

"He's doing well," I grudgingly admitted.

"Spectacularly, I would say. The review was a stone rave. What a con he's pulling. Coming on like a hippie Grandma Moses. 'Brilliant primitive style.' Christ, you'd think somebody in the art biz would figure out he had two years in Paris and his Dad owns half of GM."

"That's his grandfather. And it's a little company that makes alternators."

He slapped my shoulder and laughed. "You're as picky as ever, Larry," he said.

Chris is my best friend, my oldest friend. In 1969 when I arrived as a freshman at Bettner College, I was an aggressive, straight arrow, virgin nineteen year old, fresh out of three years at a strict prep school, who painted water color landscapes to relax. I tested out of a lot of the required courses and set out to find myself in a course load of economics, organic chemistry, calculus, and Russian. Almost as an afterthought I signed up for a course in drawing from life. It was in the drawing class that I met Chris who was a year ahead of me and was already regarded as one of the stars of the Art Department. In the hot house world of the university at the end of the sixties things like Chemistry and Economics were painfully irrelevant. The action was be found in courses like the arts and philosophy and most of all in what was going on outside of the classes. Chris was my guide. He would track me down in my austere dorm room or my carrel in the library and say, "Come on, there are these fantastic people who are just back from Morocco that you must meet." "Come out to my place and try this hash, or this blotter acid I've just scored." "Come on, Larry," he would say, "I've got to show you this book I just got on Mayan ruins," or "you've got to hear this incredible new album I just got."

I was totally unused to the role of protégé and more than once I bridled but his enthusiasm was so strong and the world he was revealing to me so seductive that I had to follow him. I was better than average in the drawing class but in the second semester of the first year when I took a course in painting in oils I found I had a real talent for painting and a real love for painting. By the start of the second year I had enough status in the Art Department to make Chris treat me as an equal. I read like a fiend and developed my own enthusiasms. My father, who is a fairly conventional man, was apoplectic about my new interest in art and even for a time cut off the pocket money I needed to buy paints and canvas but if you were a part of Chris's circle this wasn't much of a problem. Whenever funds were running low he would get into his Volkswagen van, disappear for a day or two, buy and then sell a few pounds of Jamaican or a few ounces of hash and then all the wine and drugs and paints and canvas that you could want would appear out of the back of that van. Chris was the village shaman, one of the resident wise men. If some young freshmen decided it was time to see what was going on with this dope thing they would get an introduction to Chris and Chris would see that they ended up with something that was right for them. When someone got into trouble with drugs, it was Chris who led the rescue squad, who would show up like paramedics and talk the poor fellow back to earth. He lived in a large, decrepit, rented house in town and this old house with its walls painted pink was a sort of counter culture student union.

I was there painting like crazy, trying to capture all the aspects of the carnival.

Chris had always been ahead of me. When I had been a sophomore, still furtively testing myself with women, Chris had married the woman he was living with because the school was trying to make all the unmarried students return to the discipline of the dormitories: something that did not appeal to Chris in any way. The next year, while I was enjoying the luxury of finally having studio space of my own Chris found himself, to his great displeasure, about to become a father. He told me about it later. "I told her," he said, "if you want a child fine, but I'm not going to have anything to do with it. It's going to be your responsibility entirely. We had a horrible time. I remember we took acid together a few times then and you can't imagine the things we got into. For weeks I was having these squishy red dreams, full of little fetal, fish like things."

A couple of years after that, long after he had moved in with Liz, we were at his place. We were pretty high and listening to music, when a short, thickly muscled guy came in. He was an intense fellow with curly hair, olive skin and a thick mustache. I somehow got the idea that the guy was from the Mafia but I was really too stoned to pay much attention. He wanted to buy some crystal methadrene and after Chris had offered him a taste, he quoted a price that was about two thirds of what I had seen him selling the stuff to his good friends for. After the guy left I managed to say, "Is that guy a mobster of something? Making you give him a price like that?"

"Basil?" Chris said, genuinely amused at my stoned misunderstanding. "He is a teacher. A football coach, I guess. He married my wife. Takes care of my kid. I always quote him my best price. Kind of in lieu of child support. You know what I mean?" And then Chris laughed. I was amazed at the sense of it. These people had created their own rules while I stumbling amidst the remnants of my childhood lessons.

Chris rarely shows any anger and so I was surprised a few days later when we were listening to some music and suddenly he spoke in a startlingly angry tone. "I'd like to have my daughter around sometimes. I really would but you know you can't imagine the pressure that they can put on you to conform when you have a kid. It's unbelievable. You just can't imagine, Larry."

We stopped by the back door to look over the valley.

"Do you hear from Linda anymore?" he asked.

"Occasionally. She keeps her hand in. I got a Christmas card and she called me in February to tell me how happy she was."

"Touching."

"She doesn't like to be forgotten."

There was a silence then and I realized it was my turn to ask some questions.

"So how's business with you?"

"Business is real good. I've become a bit of a chic thing for the local elite. My pottery came in along with earth colors on the houses you know. A couple of good shops in Louisville have my things at quite high prices. I even had a commission order. Six hundred dollars for a complete dinner set, a wedding gift for a banker's daughter. Do you believe it? They love my stuff. I think I would quit dealing except I like the social side of it, you know. Things are good.

"Liz is making some money," he continued, "doing a research project. Her tuition and some money besides. She's managing some apartment buildings her uncle has in Bloomington. We're doing just fine. I would like to take a vacation to Martinique or Puerto Vallarta or someplace but it would be too damn conspicuous."

Chris led me into the house. There was another porch on the back of the house. This one was screened in to make a small, open room. There was a low cane table with the tortured remains of a large, often used white candle and an ashtray full of the ash of old joints. Two unfinished, wooden, rocking chairs sat beside the table and when I stopped to admire them, Chris said, "Toby Bolken made those. He's got a furniture shop up on highway 30. Made them himself."

The rest of the house was familiar. There hadn't been too many changes since I was there last. Liz had filled the wide kitchen window with a thick curtain of hanging plants that seemed to actually tint the afternoon light softly green. The counter top and the table were still crowded with the familiar glass decanters of spices, coffees and grains. The heavy wooden table itself seemed an old friend from many late night conversations.

To make an adequate work room for himself, Chris had removed the walls that had once separated the rooms that had served the previous owner as parlor and dining room to make a room nearly thirty feet long that ran from the front door back to the kitchen. He had filled it with workbenches and long shelves full of his work, some of which was finished and priced and the rest waiting to be fired. The walls were thickly and randomly covered with drawings and pictures that he used to inspire his work - landscapes from calendars and color photos of near-by places that he liked. He had some pictures of Greek vases that he had torn from a magazine and a few pages of complex abstract doodles from the notebooks he kept. Against the wall next to the kitchen a very expensive stereo sat on an antique end table and there were about a dozen orange crates full of records. Chris has by far the best collection of records I have ever seen. If the IRS ever should follow him into a record store, the jig is up.

I looked at the finished works that he displayed on the heavy wooden shelves. Among a batch of elegant vases I found two large bowls, which were decorated with a sort of quasi-Japanese design, done in a brilliant metallic vermilion. I knew enough about ceramics to know that that wasn't an easy color to get onto clay.

"How in the world did you get that color?" I asked.

"It is a bitch to do. You wouldn't believe it. Best part is it is totally non-toxic. No metals. Not that the customer would know. I met this sort of mystical guy who teaches in the Art Department down at IU. I turned him onto some world class hash and he was so grateful he turned me onto some neat tricks. The guy is a stone genius about clay but he is lazy. He loves to come out here and he's trying to get me into the University shops where I can try to do porcelain. They got some unbelievable kilns there. Some are even computer controlled. Problem is you can't work stoned at the U."

"This stuff is terrific," I said.

"Yeah, not bad. I'm giving up the faux Navaho trip to go after some eastern ideas. Terri turned me on to this whole Eastern Trip. Japanese. Tibetan. Those guys are wizards."

"Terry who? Do I know him?"

"A new friend. Check these out." He pointed to crudely fashioned set of cups.

"They're nice."

"You're being polite. They are awful. They would make a real Jap laugh. It is supposed to be for the tea ceremony. But I am learning. There's all kinds of stuff out there if you just keep looking for it."

Chris walked about in the center of the room as if he were discovering again what a pleasant place it was. On a low table next to the window he had set three small ceramic vases with freshly cut flowers - one with brightly veined tulips, another with a small cloud of lilac, and a third that held a row of blue, bell shaped flowers that I had never seen before.

"You ever really look at flowers?" Chris said. "Very simple at first glance, perfect shapes and yet they are tremendously intricate. Look at them. Here. The stamen. The petals and the way they join here. And smell them."

He moved the lilac closer to my face.

"You can't smell it, can you? You really ought to get out of the city before all your senses leave you in despair."

On the edge of the workbench I noticed Chris's small chessboard. It was a beautiful piece of work. The board itself was inlaid with finely grained dark wood and the pieces were made of silver and jade. They were positioned to show an intricate endgame.

"Do you recognize this?" Chris asked.

"Of course," I said. "I was there when you bought it."

"No, I mean the game," he said and then he reached out and moved the white queen so that it stood directly in front of the three pawns which protected the black king.

"Marshall's game of gold," I said. I was pleased that I remembered.

"Very good," he said. "A thing of beauty don't you think. Real beauty."

"Yes," I said. "Do you still play?"

"No, I don't have the time sense for it. I study the games. Been trying to view them as works of art. Varied applications of creative intellect or something like that. Mental subtleties that might prove transferable. You know? Does that make sense?"

"Yes."

The workroom and the kitchen filled one lateral half of the rectangular house. The other half was divided into four smaller rooms. In the middle just off a short hall was the bathroom and a small dark room with a couple of antique dressers and a single bare mattress lay on the floor. Chris led me into the room at the front of the house, which served as their bedroom.

"You want to see your painting?" he asked.

"My what?"

"You remember. Your painting Veritas. You gave it to me when you left."

The small room was nearly filled by a large mattress that was laid directly on the floor, covered with a suggestive tangle of sheets and blankets. There was a small unfinished table that held a plastic alarm clock, a couple of empty green Drummond Ale bottles and a paperback book on astrology, now permanently bent out of shape by late night reading. Presiding over it all, filling the entire long wall was my painting. As soon as I saw it I knew that it was by far the best thing I had ever done. It was much better than I had remembered, much better than I wanted it to be. I saw instantly many things I had known then but had forgotten. Its composition reminded me of the giant buildings of the city, where an architect had to struggle to combine the mass of human sized things, the floors and windows and doors, with the vastly larger shape and statement of the building itself. At first glance the canvas seemed to be only a darkly emotional abstract but as you stared at it you began to see faces and figures, groups of figures and miniature landscapes. It worked well on both levels I think. It had been done during an intense troubled time for me and for that reason I guess it was my most creative period. The things that bothered me then, the questions that gave grudging birth to this canvas, would now seem unreal to me if I tried to approach them again. But they were intense questions, never answered but only compromised away, grown over as if by a jungle of more congenial but clearly lesser considerations. For nearly three months this painting had been my reality as I absorbed myself in the work. Its textures and nuances had been more real to me than the world around my body. I had painted it in the last months Linda and I lived together and in the figures of her I can see that I knew her much better then than I did in our first months together when I was so much in love with her. It was obvious I knew what would happen in the end and much of the dark beauty I saw in this canvas came from that feeling of futile foreknowledge.

Of all the figures of friends that I worked into the composition, only the one of Chris at work with the clay seemed serene. I painted it just after my first trip to Chicago, after seeing the large El Greco there for the first time. I painted it during the time that the first fine weeks of my affair with Linda were beginning. It was the last part of the painting to be completed and I could see by then that the effort was nearly behind me and the result was really quite good. In any case, the image of Chris makes a startling contrast to the confusion of the composition and the faces of the other figures.

In the center of the canvas I had painted a nearly exact miniature of Liz's beautiful face. I couldn't remember painting it yet as I stared at it I realized that it had a great deal to suggest. I coveted the skill I had had at that moment.

I turned away suddenly as if I had been awakened violently, head shaking, eyes glazed from a deep sleep. Chris was standing against the wall a little behind me, watching calmly with a slight smile, his arms folded across his chest.

As we were leaving the room I noticed a small framed color picture of Liz and her large family dressed up for some occasion which was set on the windowsill. Except for the wealth of plants in the kitchen this seemed the only sign that this was her house as well as his.

"I'm really pleased with this place," Chris said. "I finally have got everything just about the way that I want it."

"And this, you can see, is the most important place in the house. My den and office, he said as he led me towards the room in the back of the house. This last room was also small and dark. The window had been covered over by the thick growth of shrubs and Chris turned on two small brass lamps as we entered. The smallness of the room was heightened by the incredible amount of furniture that Chris had managed to squeeze into it. There were two large dressers with nearly twenty drawers between them, a roll top desk, badly in need of refinishing, two small end tables, two wicker chairs and one worn brown velour easy chair, a large trunk with thick metal bands and a long, low bookshelf with a row of books - a battered Merck's Guide, a Physician's Handbook, some other things on health and a large number about Eastern religions and a good number on color theory. On the top of one of the dressers was a beautifully carved ivory box he had used to store roaches when we were in school. Next to it was a small Buddha carved out of jade and another brass one that held in his crossed legs the fine black residue of burned incense. A thin old bone china bowl held the different rings that Chris had worn at various times. In small picture frames scattered around the room I saw many old pictures: a photo of Liz, one of some people I didn't recognize standing outside of this place and one of younger versions of Chris and myself clowning in tuxedos at the graduate art show our senior year. There was another of he and I with Liz and Linda standing by a mound of the dirty drifted snow in front of the old house he had rented when we were in school. There was one of Tommy Baxter, who had overdosed seriously a year ago and was still in a hospital somewhere, dressed up in sunglasses to look like a redneck policemen. There was an intricate mandella someone had drawn with a felt tipped pen years before when we were all doing a lot of acid and two very old, dark, sepia photographs in intricate and expensive wooden frames. One was of a small cherub-faced girl in a white dress, carelessly holding a cloth doll with huge button eyes. Liz told me later that it was a picture of his grandmother as a little girl. The other was a photograph of an Edwardian painted in stiff jacket with a high collar painting a portrait of a plump naked woman who was posing for him. I couldn't tell if the photograph was antique or one of those shots that you could have made at fairs. The picture itself seemed old but there was something about the people in it that made it seem as if you could round into them as you turned a corner.

"So what did you have in mind?" Chris asked, startling me from my reflections.

"Four ounces," I said, "if it's good."

"It's good," he said. "I'll tell you what. Special deal for an old friend. I'll make it five for a hundred and forty five and you can sell the fifth for expenses. You'll want to try it first I know. Not till later though if you don't mind. I've got to work for a while and this will make you drowsy. It's the Jamaican strain in it, maybe even a touch of opium. We'll do it tonight. Then you can make up your mind."

"You have it here?"

"Lord, no. Just a sample. I've got something else you might like here though. Personal favorite of mine, now that I have to make an honest living."

His large hand slipped past the clutter on the top of the roll top desk and slid aside a small wooden panel hidden in the back. He removed a small, plastic vial full of white powder.

"This is my new favorite. Liz thinks I'm becoming addicted but I keep it in line. When I get things set up right I can do good work for hours at a time with this stuff."

From the top drawer of one the dressers he took a broad hand mirror that was backed with intricately worked silver, a flat-edged surgical scalpel and a small bit of white plastic tubing, about three inches long and the width of a drinking straw. "This," he said, holding up the tube, "is marvelous, very utilitarian. We modified it out of something designed to cure venereal disease. Somebody should have put it into ‘The Whole Earth Catalogue"."

He tapped the bottle delicately till he had a tiny mound of the powder on the plate of the mirror that he set carefully on the desktop. Then he began to divide the powder into thin, inch long lines with the scalpel.

"Got into this a month or so ago," Chris said. "Got myself into a bit of domestic trouble. Innocently misread the personnel, I guess. Got a little too creative. Anyway, Liz decided to teach me a lesson by moving out for three days. I was a mess. Dope didn't help. I even tried Quaaludes but all that did was make the time pass slower. Finally, I stumbled on to this stuff and it was perfect. I worked like crazy. Turned out some good stuff even. And before I knew it she was back."

He stopped talking, inserted the wide end of the tube into one nostril, pinched closed the other and sucked the powder up through the tube. He switched nostrils and continued till he finished half the powder and then he passed the mirror and tube to me. It was nice stuff. I felt it at once all through my nose and I could taste it in the back of my throat. I wet my finger, cleaned the residue off the plate and wiped it onto the tip of my tongue, which soon went numb.

"Nice shit," Chris said.

"Yes."

I had to move. I got up and started to look about the room. The old picture of the four of us caught my attention first but I decided to let that go for a while and I looked at the old picture of Chris's grandmother. Nice shit. I thought about going back into the bedroom to look at my painting but decided not to. Best to ease into these things, I thought. No point in rushing the effects. Just then at the far end of the house, seemingly miles away, I heard a key turn in a lock and I tensed.

"Relax," Chris said. "It's only Liz."

I heard a second, then a third lock open and then they snapped shut again and I heard her steps as she made her way back through the house. Finally she gave me a light kiss, exchanged a little small talk with Chris and then, realizing what was going on, she excused herself saying she had something to do. In a minute or so we heard the radio playing country music from the kitchen.

My mind was stumbling with too much energy.

"So that what happened?" I asked. "Don't leave me hanging."

"Tell you about what? About our little problem? Our menage a trouble? You know Terri Riatt? A thin girl, kind of shy, with these huge dark eyes. She's into astrology and psychic things - an extraordinarily acute woman when you get down to her level. She was staying with us and it seemed to me she might fit into our little group in a more active level if you know what I mean. Anyway the whole thing broke apart under pressure from Liz mostly but I'm not too sure how crazy Terri was about the whole thing. She's not as advanced as she would like to believe. Still it would have been something to accomplish. You know, the forces were all there. All there. It could have been done. It would have been something to accomplish, too. Unveil all the feelings. Live with the possibilities, you know. You smile. Do you disagree?"

"I think I see both sides. With Linda, I wanted to deny anything to keep her. The possibilities there were all ones that took her away from me. She left and now I am much more receptive to these possibilities."

Chris laughed. "It's probably unkind of me to say it so much after the fact but I've felt that you would have been a better painter if you weren't so damned romantic."

"If I wasn't romantic I wouldn't have painted at all."

He sat back and laughed again. "Damn," he said. "You know, Larry, I do miss our conversations. We have got to find a way to bring you back here more often."

I laughed at that, at the pleasure of being wanted, and as if by way of celebrating, Chris laid out four more thick lines and passed me the plastic mister of water.

As the second set of lines came on I felt suddenly out of control. The coke was stronger then I expected. My mind was raging with false starts. I would fix for a moment on an idea of anything and then an instant later it would be jerked away to fix on something else. I could hardly remember who I was. I nearly panicked. I felt as if I were lost and frightened, like a child lost in a fun house, trying to pick the one real exit from the wealth of false choices. I had been through this before though and in some long dormant part of my brain I knew I could find remedies. Focus. Focus on something. Keep the mind from racing. Withdraw, I thought. I could hardly hope to put two words together while Chris would be totally in control of himself, this was the level where he lived his life. And why now did I run away from a chance to see myself free from the confining patterns of my normal days, wasn't that why I had come here after all? And why now did I feel such a need to shield myself from my best friend? Why? Well, that was just one of those questions that you learned to avoid when you were stoned. Just another thing to avoid. I just didn't want to deal with them, that was all.

But it was just a surge of paranoia. Chris put his hand lightly on my arm and passed by out into the hallway. He could tell I was past the point of conversation and so he left me to my dreams. He put a record on the stereo. The country music disappeared, replaced by quiet classical music, a Mozart flute concerto, I think, and soon I heard the regular spinning of his wheel. I went back into the bedroom and stared for a long time at my painting trying to understand the ways I had been different then.

Liz had always seemed to me to be perfectly suited to this place. You looked at her and saw someone who was on a straight trip from pretty child to elegant old age. She was thin, with high cheeks and a smooth long neck. Her eyes were dark and round and her black hair fell smoothly and softly onto her shoulders. She wore the uniform of the time, blue jeans worn but ironed, and a blue denim work shirt unbuttoned at the top just enough to show a hint of shadow between her small breasts, just enough to let you know she wouldn't mind if you wanted to sneak a look. When she moved, she moved like a young colt, all impulse and emotion, loose and easy like a young girl running to see what was under the tree at Christmas.

She had been born on a farm and you could see in her legs and her smooth full arms that she was used to working with her body. She had none of the narrow provincialism that often comes with the isolation of farm life though. Her father was a very peculiar man, peculiar in the sense of unique. He kept shelves full of classical albums. He read Plato, Aristotle and Thoreau, lingering to consider the weight of each statement. He was a short square man with an easy laugh and a soft round face, who traded his overalls for a plaid sport coat and white shirt at dinnertime. He loved to preside over intellectual conversations at the long crowded table; conversations he tended to dominate. I was there once, when we had all been in school, for a wonderful and immense meal of potatoes and country ham and serious conversation. The food was excellent and the conversation was interesting though it seemed to belong to another time, old fashioned and optimistic. I would have been more comfortable if there had been a little more nihilism, a bit more irony to it. Still, her father was a remarkable man. He had been a lawyer, a schoolteacher, a successful farmer and the father of six children.

Her mother had once been a promising musician but she gave up her career to marry Liz's father. To my surprise, although she was a very shy and retiring woman (unfashionable traits in women those days), she seemed quite content with her life. They were both descendants in some involved way from the community of idealists who had first settled New Harmony, Indiana, a few miles south of their current farm. Liz's father was quite pleased with the connection and in his study, he had several nicely reproduced photos of the original settlement buildings. They were both pleasantly open people and I knew far more about them than I knew about Chris's parents who were from old Virginia families. His father was an executive with Bank of Virginia. Twice a year he shared a week of golf and tennis with Chris and Liz at an expensive resort in South Carolina. Beyond that I knew little about Chris's family. He rarely spoke of them.

When Liz first came to college she was interested in a career in music, emulating her mother's interest and in fact she had a music scholarship. She soon decided though that this was her mother's ambition and not her own and she switched to the Art Department. I met her on her third day in the department and I was struck by her immediately. She stood out even on that small campus that was so crowded with pretty women. I got my courage together to approach her and when we talked and I heard she had an interest in ceramics (because it's practical and artistic too, you know?) I introduced her to Chris who was a junior then and clearly the star of the department. He was depressed by his divorce and in need of some distraction. It was only a few weeks later that she began to share the large room that Chris was then using as a studio and apartment. I remember that I was alarmed by the speed with which their relationship developed. I pulled Chris aside one day and told him that someone of his experience ought to be cautious with a woman who had so little experience as Liz and perhaps had even been a virgin. He laughed easily at that and called me an envious Christian (a phrase he subsequently replaced with the more exact, envious Puritan.) A day or so later, Liz made a point of meeting me as I was leaving a class and telling me that she was quite able to take care of herself. The first year of their relationship was far from serene though. Liz was slow to adjust to the fact that even then Chris was dealing drugs on a fairly large scale. She was also depressed by the realization that though she worked very hard she could not approach Chris's excellence in ceramics. She finally switched majors again. This time she moved to biology where she is competent but I think uninspired. She is still working at it, taking a couple of graduate courses and working as lab assistant, measuring the flow of electrical impulses across the surface of the hearts of rats.

I was embarrassed at being so high and so it wasn't until an hour of so later that I got around to trying to talk to her. She was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table and studying some manila folders that were filled with hand written data.

"Nice stuff?" she asked as I entered the kitchen.

I nodded. "It's mostly gone now."

"It's good to have you around, Killer," she said. "How's your love life?"

"A few tawdry affairs. Nothing that satisfies: nothing that transcends."

"Something suitably cynical and witty, I'm sure."

There was something in our sparring that I found arousing and surprising. A sign of interest? A form of flattery?

"Have you heard anything from Linda?" she asked.

"No, have you?"

"Some."

"I'm not sure I want to hear about it. It took me a while to get over her leaving me in the first place."

"Who ever got that picture you painted of her? I loved that picture."

"I think it's in her uncle's dining room."

"I always used to wonder if it was in your bedroom or theirs."

Another voice. "Why would Skyler need it? He's got her." It was Chris who had stepped through the studio door. He went to refrigerator and pulled out a beer and held it for me see. "Schoenling's Little Kings," he said, "It's the perfect beer for coke. The tastes mix and it mellows the speed of it. Hope you'll excuse me but when I get this stuff in me I like to use the energy to work. I'll be laying out a few more lines in a little while."

I declined.

Liz and I had always been close in college. She was a good friend of Linda's and besides that the fact that I was a good friend of Chris's seemed to stabilize our relationship. It meant we could count on each other sexually. We could share confidences without worrying about where it might be taking us. By convention and perhaps good sense we didn't have to worry about a sexual situation rising that would change our relationship and there was no need to worry about revealing something that might jar a lover's image of you. As often happens in this situation, I think we shared things with each other that we could not share with our lovers.

"I've seen them together, Linda and Scott. They were here for a few days last fall", Liz said. "They're very good for each other. I don't think she loves him the way she loved you but it is much healthier thing."

"Well," I said, "the only thing that bothered me about that was that she could live without me. Hurt my pride."

"Don't you get lonely in the city?"

"Sometimes. I have friends though. Even an affair or two."

When Liz realized that Chris had gone back to his work she suggested that we go for a walk. She closed and locked the door behind us and we headed across the lawn towards the woods. The two black cats followed us, stretching from their sleep. They seemed to sense an air of adventure. They lingered now and then to playfully attack each other.

"They're too friendly to be cats," Liz complained. "They think that they're dogs. We're all a little confused around here, I guess."

She stopped at her car to add a couple of folders to the tall pile that shared the back seat of her car with a mess of rumpled sweaters and a pair of hiking boots. "I've learned that my days work a little smoother if I figure out at soon as possible what I'm going to need tomorrow. The mornings are a little shaky around here sometimes."

Suddenly I remembered the tentative title I had given to that painting back in the house. I was going to call it. "We all want to tell our story to a pretty girl." That was the working title. It was probably a better title for it than Veritas. I started to stroll leisurely down the hill, wondering if Liz had heard all my stories, wondering if I would remember them myself. Liz had something else in mind though. She took my arm and we walked slowly along the fence that marked the end of their property. We walked over the open ground away from the house down towards the edge of the woods.

It felt good to just take a walk. In the city you always seemed to have to be going somewhere. I remembered physical sensations I had known when I had lived here before. I wondered if the reality of my college years hadn't been wholly sensual. The brilliance of sunsets over the long valleys. The physical intimacy of the humid heat in the summer and the way in deep winter your breath leaves you in visible waves. You could see it, could know it, that part of yourself you were giving up to the air. I felt realer for those sensations. I used to love it when it was very cold. Then the line between you and the world around you seemed very well defined. I thought again of the smells here. There are thousands of smells out here. In the city, I moved from one air-conditioned box to another, between them was only a mist of ozone and gasoline, enough to discourage the senses. My landscapes were landscapes of numbers: accounts payable, accrued interest, projected growth, rate to probable call, yield to maturity . . . A very intricate and effective hiding place. At one time I had used numbers, had fixated on them and geometry to occupy my mind while making love, to distract myself long enough to please the woman. Now these things had become the particulars of my environment. It was small wonder that my few affairs had left a little to be desired lately.

"What do you want, Larry?" Liz asked softly.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what do you want? A big house in the suburbs? A fancy car? A table at the country club?"

"Of course not."

"Then why this business thing? Why Chicago? Why the brokerage business? You've got us all baffled down here."

I had to think. "I don't know, I guess I was going one way, doing one thing and it wasn't working. I hurt so I went in the other direction. It's just something that happened."

"You know what I want? I want to be this total ideal hippie chick ideal. I want to dance in the woods, and be terrific in bed and have no troubles; no neuroses and I want to feed all these happy people good food out of big pots. Total happy hippie, earth mother."

"Liz, that's what you are."

She seemed pleased. She lay her arm lightly in the crock of mine and we walked on.

"So, is Melissa better in bed than Linda?" she asked.

I must be a bit more of a prude than I admit because the question jarred me. "It's not a question of is, it's a question of was. And it really didn't last long enough for me to make a fair comparison."

I thought some more and remembered some more. Remembering Melissa was not something I often did. "The pillow talk was terrific," I said. "Melissa told me a lot of stuff that Linda had said to her about me. Best friend stuff. And of course when she talked about herself it echoed a lot of stuff that Linda had said to me about her when we were together. I felt like I really knew Linda for the first time."

"I really loved them both," Liz said earnestly. "I guess I was always jealous of Melissa because she was Linda's best friend and I couldn't be. They went back to their high school days together so I guess I never really had a chance. It was terrible when Linda and Skyler were here because it seemed that Linda wanted me to hate Melissa. I couldn't do that. It was the first time I couldn't share something with Linda. She was so hurt and I couldn't share it."

"I suppose," I said, "that the reason that the thing with Melissa didn't work out was that we could never make it anything that didn't somehow involve Linda. She was always there in bed with us it seemed. Her best friend and her old lover. If I had been with Melissa first it might have worked out. But the way it was, it was always more of thing between them than between Melissa and I."

Liz looked sad. She seemed like a pouty child. The expression didn't suit her. Her pretty face was meant to be happy. We stopped in the middle of the field, halfway between the house and the edge of the woods. Uncertainty. After a moment I started to walk in the direction of the woods and Linda followed me, folding her arm into mine again.

"You remember Meg Sullivan?" she asked. "She's opening up a picture framing place up in Anderson. I was going to help her run it and have half interest."

"Really," I said, "that sounds nice. What happened?"

"Well, this thing with Dr. Clayton came up at the university. It's my field. It's what I wanted to do."

I nodded. There was something going on here. Anderson must be about 110 miles away. Not exactly easy commuting distance and not really a very exciting place to be from what I had heard.

"You would probably miss being around the university," I said. "The big school keeps a lot of good people around here."

"I suppose," she said, and after a silence she added. "You know I always had the feeling that you left here because you wanted to get away from the people who knew you with Linda."

"I suppose that's right," I said. What more did I want to say about that? After a few minutes I changed the subject. "How do you like your work?" I asked.

She thought about it as if it were a difficult question.

"Well, it's interesting. It's sure to be published. It might even be very important. "What we're doing is tracking the electrical impulses across the hearts of rats. We're looking to map fibrillation of course," she explained. "The problem is that we have a healthy and hearty bunch of rats so we all spent all our time searching for fibrillation. I'm afraid that Dr. Clayton is going to get frustrated and try to find a way to induce them."

"

"But?" I asked.

"But, I wish it was more my own work and not so much just monitoring someone else's work. I wish for once it had been something I had conceived of from the beginning."

We walked again, skirting the edge of the woods. I was so unfocussed I was really aware of nothing but the sounds of the woods. Then Liz laughed, suddenly, happily. I recalled once when she had laughed that way after being hit with a snowball outside the dorm and turned happily to the attack. Hmm, I thought, pretty deep memory.

"You tricked me," she said. "There wasn't necessarily any 'but' to it at all. There wasn't necessarily anything that was bothering me at all."

"I did no such thing," I said with a smile. The little discovery gave us an excuse to touch. She put her hand on my arm.

"I'm glad you've come, Larry, I was really pleased when Chris told me that you'd called. I need someone I can talk to."

"About Chris."

"Yes. We have our troubles. Everybody who ever lived together does I guess. I sometimes wonder how I could live with someone who is so damn sure of himself. Sometimes I pray for him to look foolish, to look clumsy or crude. But then I hate myself for being so petty. You would think that somebody who breaks as many laws as he does would seem at least selfish sometimes would . . . seem . . . seem . . . bad. Sometimes. But he never does. He's always right. Everything is always explained. Everything is noble."

"And you'd like to catch him in a hypocrisy sometime, I bet. Move him down a peg of two closer to where the rest of us live."

"No, no. I don't think I could do that. What I want is just something for myself. I want a chance to be myself, to throw a tantrum, to be a little selfish once in a while. Some nights when the house is full of his friends I would like to be able to just shout, 'Go away all of you. I want him for myself for a while.' I want to be petty and have him love me for it or at least respect me for it. How's that for vaulting ambition?"

"It makes sense to me."

"Yeah, I thought it would." She seemed genuinely relieved, even exhilarated at having finally found someone who could understand what she had to say, someone who could be safely confided in.

"About a month or so ago," she continued, "we had a terrible time. There was this girl, Terri Riatt. She's married to this guy who is over at Champaign now. He's dealing pretty heavily and doing something with videotape. They don't see much of each other. Well, she was staying here, because they were having some troubles. She and I got on pretty well but then, out of the blue, well, it seemed like it was out of the blue, Chris suggested we should become, you know, a threesome. I don't know that he even was sleeping with her. I guess they must have . . . but . . . he made it all sound so damned reasonable, so damned pure, so natural. I thought about it for a day or two and it was just driving me out of my mind. It was ruining everything. Everything. We were all strangers suddenly. I hated Terri and I didn't know how I felt about Chris. We had a bad, bad scene, the worst we've ever had, I guess, and you know him, he's so damned strong, so damned convincing. You must have seen it. Between the two of you it's a game though, an exercise for when we're all stoned or drunk but between us it was life or death or at least it seemed like it was. It was terrible. Finally I told him, it's going to be my way or not at all and I left him for a few days to show him I was serious and just because I had to. I guess I won, but now I seem so petty, so petty. I know he's your best friend but you understand don't you?"

"I used to have very similar arguments with Linda."

"And do you think you were right?"

"I think I'm living alone," I said.

"You know what else?" Liz said. "I've never made love to anyone but Chris."

I was surprised. It didn't seem like there were a lot of virgins around then.

"The way things go around here," she said, "it's very odd that it is true but it is important to me in a funny way. My friends and I were always sort of radicals when we were in high school. Long hair, denim and peace signs, but absolutely nothing like what goes on around here. All the right music but we really didn't know anything. All the other girls married their high school guys and are making babies in New Harmony. But not me, I met Chris and fell in love. But Chris never asked. I don't think it makes any difference to him. It doesn't mean anything to him. Nothing."

We walked on. I couldn't think of anything to say. Finally, Liz spoke, "I want it to matter to him but it doesn't."

Another silence, another few steps.

"You know how things finally came to a head with he and Terri and I? There was one really crazy night. Acid and pounds of everything else. Cocaine and coffee and Colombian and the next morning, it was the next afternoon really, we all woke up in the same bed, in our bed, under your picture and nobody could remember anything. Or at least I couldn't remember anything. But I knew that room smelled bad. And right there I drew a line."

At last we had reached the edge of the woods, we looked in, but it seemed too tangled and too threatening to go further and so, our minds working as one, we turned around and began the slow walk back up the gentle slope to the house.

When we were about halfway back to the house Liz broke away from me and ran a few yards ahead, with her back to me she jumped and clicked her heels before she hit the ground again. It was their trademark move. I could remember she and Melissa and Linda doing it together, the three sisters, arms linked, back in our college years.

She turned to face me. "Oh, Larry," she said, "why couldn't it just stay the same? We were all so happy then." I couldn't answer. I walked up the hill to meet her and gave her my arm again and we walked the last few yards to the house.

Chris's cats finally caught up with us and when we began to walk up the hill towards the house; they looked at each other in despair and then went racing together out into the woods.

Liz fried some catfish and potatoes for dinner and when we were all full, Chris began the ritual of making coffee. He had an elaborate collection of grinders, filters and beakers and he used them as carefully and as lovingly as he used any of the other tools. He had to be careful to spend the profits of his drug dealing in ways that didn't show and so while he drove an old van and his house was almost decrepit on the outside the tools and trinkets he owned were all top quality. As Chris played with the filters and the boiling water, he lectured, "Only the best dopes here. The coffee beans come from Columbia. That must be a remarkable climate to produce the things it does. Phenomenal!" He giggled. "Heh, heh, heh." It was a familiar chorus to the conversations here. "It seems very odd to me that I am a criminal. In this country full of drug users, I am a criminal." He held up the brown bag of coffee beans. "Coffee," he said. "It's medium to high grade speed with the benefit of taste and commercial connections, legitimate commercial connections. Coffee is fine speed, too, but just have a little too much and look out. Businessman kills secretary in midst of coffee high! Can the menace be stopped?! I can see it happening. Front page of the Indianapolis Star, right below the car accident. And what else? Cigarettes, for Christ sake. They're mostly constriction. Little pieces of death to appease the primal death wish. Stop the blood, like strychnine. You know, I smoke cigarettes in inverse proportion to the amount of dope I smoke. Liquor is a heavy, heavy downer on anybody's scale. And God knows what is in some of the things that the drug companies turn out. Quick! Lizzy! Bring me the Thorazine, I'm feeling a little blue. Valium is nice though. I use it now. For the end of tripping or with dope when you've been doing so much that it's not doing you much good. Valiums are nice. I've got two life time prescriptions. It pays to deal to doctors, Larry. People would be better off with vitamins. God knows we take a lot of vitamins around here. You're a big drinker, Larry; you ought to be doing some B vitamins and Brewer's Yeast. Really."

He stopped for a minute and then returned to his original thought. "I can't believe I'm a criminal," he said. "I mean shouldn't the real effects of these things have some meaning? Shouldn't this whole idea of guilt be at least a little rational?"

The coffee trickled down in the lower beaker and finally it was done. Chris poured it out into some large cups he had made and then he rolled another thick joint of the Mexican. I declined when he offered it to me and while he smoked he talked about some opium he had handled a few months before.

"Did you care for that coke?" he asked. "There's plenty of it around yet. Terrific deal at eighty five."

"No, thanks," I said. "It's out of my league."

"You see that Liz approves of your choice," Chris said. He had noticed some glance between us that we were hardly aware of ourselves. He didn't miss very much.

"I really do wish you would do a little less of it," Liz said. "It's so expensive even when you're dealing and I'm sure it's dangerous."

"If you take the time to find out about the drugs you're doing they really aren't all that dangerous."

"You remember Steve Beiderman?" Liz said to me.

"I think so. Thin kid. People used to call him Snake."

"He died," Liz said. "A massive failure of his nervous system. Too many downers."

"And it was needless," Chris said.

"This is another of Chris's theories," Liz said. "He maintains that Steve would still be alive if he had had some cocaine then."

"Well, of course he would," Chris said. "A stimulant was just what he needed then."

When Chris and Liz were together they seem to compliment each other in many different ways. Liz's quiet manner balanced the flights of Chris's mind. Her involvement in her job, in the apartments and the university, even the mundane requirements of shopping were a vital anchor in Chris's isolated life. They added important dimensions to each other's conversation yet when Liz is away from him, she relaxes. She became much more open, more likely to talk about herself and more likely to gossip and to laugh. I think she must be a little afraid of saying something that would seem foolish by Chris's standards. I think she might be more comfortable talking about the weather and recipes.

"Well, off to work," Chris said. "I have some things I must do before the social hour. I am expecting my dealer. A dealer's dealer. Heh, heh, heh."

After a while I excused myself and followed Chris into the workroom. He was sitting at the wheel with another joint of the Mexican. He looked very amused when I declined his offer again. "You must excuse me," he said. "Perhaps I should concede more to being social but I am a nicer guy when I stick to my routines. We'll talk later."

I could feel a touch of a new high forming in my head simply from the mist in the air. Chris started the wheel and set up a handful of clay. Soon he was so engrossed in his work that I knew he would have nothing to say to me. Chris has a tremendous gift of concentration. If he were the painter instead of I he would still be turning out canvases. He would simply have forbidden concerns of career or romance to enter his mind during the time he had set aside for the canvases. It was a lesson I never learned.

Liz was in the kitchen whistling to herself to herself and stacking the evening dishes that she had just finished washing. It was a chance to talk to Liz again but I decided to let the afternoon's events settle in my mind and so I took my coffee out onto the back porch and sat down in one of the wooden rockers. It was going to be a beautiful night, warm with just a few bands of clouds to the west that would glow vivid in the coming sunset. Very nice, I thought. What remains when you free yourself from the constant noise? Of the world? Of your mind? I closed my eyes and stretched back in the chair. A breeze rustled the trees for just a moment as if to wipe away all the remaining noise and when it was still again I was suddenly clear-headed and aware of every noise around me. The coffee within the earthen cup warmed my hands and my stomach. My thoughts loosened. It seemed that they floated and arranged themselves into more natural orders. It was easy to see things clearly now that I no longer had to contend with the constant crashing aural haze of the city - the traffic and the trains, the millions of televisions and radios, the millions of lives and lungs and hearts, the mechanical, steady breathing of the giant buildings. The air there must be a constant crazed storm. You couldn't know it till you got out here, back to the valley and a porch and a stillness like this, so pure that it could carry to your ear the caw of the crow there, a tiny black spot to the eye on the post by the field next to the road. I heard the steady soft whir of Chris's wheel though the two closed doors and I could hear from the kitchen the sound of one plate softly striking another despite Liz's care to keep them quiet. Each of these was a sound isolated. Things could be known out here, and not just as another fleeting bit in a cloud of energy. As Norrel used to say as he painted a single seashell in the middle of these large canvases, an actor on an empty stage, speaking to you alone. In that case, the idea was better than the painting, of course.

The screen door opened and I heard Liz's soft steps behind me. She stood behind my rocking chair and began to massage my shoulders.

Somehow in my own lying memory it seemed to me that Linda and I must have spent many hours in chairs like this, on a porch, in the comfortable silence, watching the quiet street or sharing a bottle of wine with friends. Perhaps it was only a dozen times or a half dozen but each one had been a very fine, very special time and now I had nothing at all to match it.

The crow rose from his perch and with a caw and lazy grace he headed slowly upwind towards the woods along the highway. I had a sudden thought that sent a shiver through my chest and arms. As I had once wondered when Linda and I first broke up if she were sharing the same sexual adventures with Skyler that we had known, I wondered if she was now sharing this same sense of peace. It was sad that now when it all seemed so far away, when our lives had parted sharply and surely, that I could still sting myself with a sudden bit of jealousy. I thought, where is she now? This moment? This very moment? What is in her mind now? Mundane concerns? What to have for dinner? The political obsessions of her work? Or maybe this stillness. Who was she now?

Liz had brought the glass beaker out from the kitchen and she refilled my cup with more coffee and returned a moment later and sat down in the rocking chair beside mine. It squeaked as it took her weight and Chris's wheel stopped and started again.

In our proximity, in the familiar yet distant silence, after so many months, we must both have sensed the same ghost, been aware of the same space no longer filled because when she spoke her quiet voice seemed to step straight into my thoughts.

"Linda asked about you when they were here," she said. "She was really concerned about you."

"That's very nice," I said.

"What were you thinking about out here all by yourself?"

"I was thinking about Linda as a matter of fact."

"You know, I always thought you two would stay together. Chris said it would never work out."

"So then. One more point for Chris."

"Yes. I'm sure though if you ever needed anything she would be glad to help you."

"I'd do the same for her certainly," I said, "but then the hard part would be to ask."

After a silence she spoke again. "You know, I heard Chris say that things were loosening up around here. There are a few places for painters at the university now. Some people from there come up here a lot. They respect Chris and they buy. He could put in a good word for you. It's the way things get done around here."

"That would be fine if I could still paint, if I still wanted to. My muse was never as gentle as Chris's was. It was never anything as simple as beauty. I paid a price for those few good things I did."

Liz was silent then and I thought at that moment I could read her thoughts. She was wondering why it was hard to comfort me. Why should I try so hard to resist her kindness. When Linda had been slow to praise my work, sensibly realizing that it would take time that might otherwise be hers, realizing perhaps that it would take me to levels she might not be able to share, Liz had always encouraged me and when the heat of that affair had taken me away from painting, Liz had told me that I might be giving up too much and no one else had said that to me. And indeed why was I so resistant to comfort? Why hadn't I fallen in love with Liz instead of Linda? With Liz's need to support people and Linda's need to be supported. Why? Because it suited me better to support.

"It's nice to be back here, Liz," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It's nice to have you back." She sounded distracted though. Had I offended? I wondered. What had I done? I couldn't read her thoughts. It was absurd, childish, naive to imagine that I could. To assume that you know what's going on in someone's mind is a sure road to trouble.

Chris's wheel stopped. There was the sound of running water as he cleaned his hands and tools. After a while he came out to join us, sitting cross-legged on the porch in front of our chairs. He had another joint, of course, which the three of us passed around. It was very good dope and soon I was high again, but pleasantly high. This was the best side of dope. No confusion, no trouble, something beautiful, music and a sunset, and the time to enjoy it. The crow had moved on to some field beyond the next ridge and gradually the sun set, playing over a long half hour a quiet symphony of changing color on the deep sky and the sparse clouds till at last the darkest blue gave way to black and the sky was full of stars. In the sudden cold Liz shivered and we all realized at once that it was time to rise stiffly and go back into the yellow light of the house.

"Do you do this in Chicago?" Liz asked. "Do you watch the sunsets?"

"Obliquely," I said. "Furtively. My only windows face east so on a pretty night I see it reflected in the windows of the tall buildings along the lake. They turn orange and red."

At night, or at least that night, Chris's house became a social focus. People dropped by throughout the evening. They came to make deals, to see other people and just to visit Chris. News was passed; information of all sorts was weighed and conveyed. There was something constant and old fashioned about it. When we came back into the kitchen we sat down around the table in stiff wooden chairs but when Liz moved two or three extra chairs in from the work room I picked out a leather backed director's chair and set it back in the corner by the refrigerator and then I went back into the workroom to thumb through the boxes of records and tapes till I found what I was looking for. It was a tape Chris had made in our college years of our friends Max and Ken playing on a dobro and a dulcimer. It was very nice, very country.

Chris pulled out his wallet and removed a surprisingly thin joint. "Now this is what I'm going to sell you. My personal stash. A remarkable mixture. The Jamaican to put you to sleep. The Colombian to wake you up. Maybe even a touch of opium."

He struck a long kitchen match, stared for an instant at the long, quick, yellow lick of flame and passed me the joint. I had been high twice already that day but this was something else entirely. I took a long toke and coughed heavily. I took a second hit and before I could pass the joint on to Liz I felt light headed - completely stoned. I started to laugh and then Chris was laughing and I tried to say how stoned I was and I got completely fouled up in the words and collapsed back into the chair. Liz, who was moving very slowly, put a Felco seed corn hat on my head and they both laughed at the way I looked, at the way the hair blossomed out from under the sides of the cap. I pulled the brim down so that it hid my eyes and I lost myself in the music. When the song ended I became aware of the complexity of my breathing. The slow rise and fall of my chest. The congestion in my nose, which usually went unnoticed suddenly, seemed so disturbing that I tried frantically and futily to blow it clear. Later, I stared at the corner of the kitchen wall and thought about how the builders many years before had laid plaster over wire over the wooden structure and then I looked at my hands and thought about the layers of cells there, proteins and what? Held together by what? Responding to what logic and order? I thought about going outside to see if I could see the stars move but it was too much trouble to get out of my chair.

People seemed to be arriving without noticing me as I sat in my little chair, behind the brim of my hat. I was being ignored. While Chris and Liz seemed quite able to deal with the visitors, I had become a deaf and dumb voyeur. I was like the senile grandmother who probably once sat in this room behind a warm stove, now replaced, detached from the business of her farm family. The visitors were a peculiar group. There was a painfully thin guy in a leather jacket and engineer's boots who made his living mowing lawns and moving cocaine. There was some guy who sold ceramics for Chris in his shop and there was a guy with a thick red beard who had just finished a job painting bridges in Cincinnati and he said that was a pretty nice town. Some of the people stayed and some left right away. A guy with light yellow skin and ash white hair came in. Chris shared a joint of Mexican with him. He wanted to buy some speed because he had a twelve-hour drive to Kentucky and back and he wanted to get back in time for surgery.

"Surgery!" I said loudly enough to startle everyone in the room. Lazarus rising.

"Yeah," the guy said. "I'm an intern."

I struggled to clear my head. Things were a little too strange. The guy's complexion changed to a more normal tone. I wondered what I had been missing while lost in my stoned solipsistic daydreams. What time was it for Christ's sake?

The intern stretched, twisting his arms back over his head as if to remove the stiffness deep in this shoulders. Like Rocky Calivito, I thought.

What the hell time was it? I wondered. I think there is only one clock in the whole house and that was back in the bedroom. Chris set his own schedules to fit his emotional needs and clocks only got in the way of that. After a moment, it occurred to me to look at my watch. 9:05. We had eaten at nine. Five past dinner? No, wait. My watch must have stopped. No, the little hand was still moving smoothly in its boring little circle. I nearly panicked again but then I remembered it was still set on Illinois time. An hour and five minutes. Christ, it seemed more like a day and five minutes. I was still very stoned but I was on top of it now, trying to wring my brain free of the stuff. I was exhausted, completely exhausted. Without my nervous energy I was like flesh without a skeleton. I decided I was going to sell all of the dope. It was just too strong to have lying around. Three or four joints of this stuff would last me a year. It was definitely fine stuff. I pulled the hat back over my eyes and drifted off again. I was still pretty stoned. It would take me a while to get out from under this stuff.

The guy with the red beard was last to leave. About twelve thirty, he got stiffly to his feet, swayed a bit and Chris walked him to the door and stood in the open doorway listening attentively till he heard the sound of the car's tires on the smoother surface of the highway. Chris locked the door and with a deep sigh, he leaned against the wall and slowly slipped down to the floor till he sat, legs straight in front of him, head down, with his back against the wall. He raised his head and then with another sigh, he said, "I think I have had enough."

I looked at him, trying to figure out what to say. My normal speech would have seemed laughably trite so I was silent.

"To bed," he said and he rose with great effort, kissed Liz lightly, pressed my shoulder as he passed and then disappeared into the darkness of his bedroom.

The kitchen was thick with smoke, the table littered with ashes and matchbooks.

"Well, I suppose I ought to join him," Liz said after a while.

"I think," I said, "that I would like to go outside for a while. Look at the stars. Breathe some air."

"Can I join you?"

"Of course."

We went out and stood by the railing of the porch. It was beautiful outside. The sky seemed absolutely brilliant with stars. There was a lush breeze that was blowing across the length of the valley, bringing the warm smells of life. I filled my lungs with air and wondered why we had spent the night inside. Liz was standing very close to me. I put my hand on hers, by accident I think, or perhaps I was trying to catch my balance. She didn't move away from my touch, but instead she looked at me, smiled and covered my hand softly with hers. I had no idea how high she was but I assumed she was less high that I was. I wanted to say something about how glad I was to be there or how I had missed them, but that was all perfectly obvious, so I kissed her, gently and pleasantly and said good night. I made a show of offering her my arm as we turned. She locked the door behind us and after another kiss in the darkness of the kitchen we went to bed; she to share the wide mattress beneath my painting with Chris and I to the thick mattress laid on the floor of the small middle room. It had been an unusually full day and there were many things for me to think about, but the night was so warm and so completely still that I fell instantly into the first dreamless sleep I had known in several months.

II

It was after nine when I woke up and I felt terrific. Completely rested. The room was very dark but when I put on the my jeans and, stretching comfortably, walked into the front room I could see that it was going to be another bright, warm day.

Liz was in the kitchen. No sign of Chris.

"Good morning," Liz said cheerfully when she saw that I was awake. "Chris has gone, I'm afraid. He went to help Tommy with some electrical work in his place."

"He shouldn't be gone too long," I said. "He knows that stuff cold." The coffee smelled very nice to me.

"Oh, with Chris it will," she said. "He never does anything like this without having a few joints and exchanging all the gossip." She poured me a cup of coffee and then fixed me some breakfast.

Later, when I thought back on what had happened and tried to figure out who had caused what, who had wanted what to happen, I found that there hadn't been any one action, but really a sort of slow dance, a quiet mutual seduction, a gradual unveiling of something covered. Her arm brushed mine while she was pouring the coffee and lingered there for a moment. Later, while I helped her do the dishes, I put my hands lightly on her hips to move her to one side so I could put something in a drawer. When the dishes were finally done we stood facing each other. If either of us had said anything it would have been different but we didn't and so in silence we kissed, at first playfully but soon with much more feeling. I could tell that she was as aroused as I was but when I tried to lead her back into the bedroom, she broke away from me and I thought perhaps I had been completely wrong but then she said, "Not here. It wouldn't be right. Everything is Chris's here."

"All right," I said, "so where then? The Hilton?"

After all, I thought, I did have credit cards.

"No," she said, "but I know a place. Come into town with me. I have to give Dr. Clayton some papers before eleven o'clock but after that I'm free."

The day was beautiful, clear and warm and still. As I got into Liz's car, I felt as if all my senses had become sharper still. More than anything else, I love that period of pure electricity that comes between the moment when you realize for the first time that you are going to sleep with someone you have wanted and the actual consummation. I put my hand on Liz's leg to try and preserve some of the tension.

She left me in the car while she went into the gaunt granite box of the science building and then she drove out a wide residential street into a distant quiet part of Bloomington. She stopped her car in front of an old four-story brick apartment building in a pleasant neighborhood atop a hill overlooking the campus. She took a key from a thick ring that she kept in the glove compartment and let us in the front door. Far down the block a woman got into a station wagon. Two young children were racing noisily on plastic tricycles but beyond that everything was very quiet.

The hall inside was quiet and dark. I followed her up to the third floor and to a door near the back of the building, which she opened with another key from the ring. Inside was a small apartment, completely empty. It had dark hardwood floors and bare walls that had been freshly covered with white paint. The air had a heavy scent of latex. The light poured in through the uncurtained window, making everything seem painfully bright. We moved about, checking the rooms, looking at them as if we were a real couple thinking of renting them, seeing if it would feel like home. We were looking for signs of anyone else's life, but there were none. No books, no paintings, no clothes. Only the white walls. I watched Liz struggle for a minute with the window before with a cracking noise it opened. I felt a cool breeze begin to sweeten the stuffy air of the room. Liz took a deep, nervous breath and rubbed her face as she looked out the window. The trees beyond were hazed and paled by the bright light behind them. I stepped up behind her and put my hands lightly on her side. She accepted the touch as if it was completely welcome. She turned around and faced me and I slipped my other hand beneath her shirt and onto her warm stomach. We pressed against each other and I could feel her breasts against my chest, her thighs against my legs.

We stepped apart and silently undressed. I left my jeans and shirt in a heap and stood naked. Liz undressed slowly, reflecting perhaps and perhaps just enjoying the moment. She folded her blouse and jeans with care and left them in a tidy pile against the wall. Naked, she was stunning. Her waist was fuller that I would have thought. Her breasts sagged gently on her chest and she folded her arm across her stomach to support them. I was pleased to see that her nipples were full and hard. She was smiling but her eyes were averted to my chest. I took her hands in mine and set them lightly on my hips and then stepped against her.

Again I was uncertain but as I stepped closer to her I smelled the warm heavy scent of her and a hundred suppressed memories flooded back as I remembered that smell and suddenly I had a strong erection. We kissed, nibbling at each other's lips and then I pulled her away from the window and leaned her in the corner of the room where we could not be seen. Our eyes met easily without any hint of fear or unease. Eagerly then, we kissed again. I supported her as well as I could against the wall. I was surprised at her strength. When I first felt her arms locked around my back I realized that she might accidentally hurt me. She shivered as I ran my hands roughly up her thighs, across the stiff hair and over her stomach. She reached down to help me enter her. At first her body resisted but then it was all slick and easy and she moaned and kissed my closed eyes. I felt as if I was lost in her body. I thought of the long Indiana valleys I had known and of the rich fields I had known as a child in Iowa. The way they shimmered as the summer heat rose from them. I thought of the times years before, when I had wanted her: once I had watched her sunbathing on the lawn and stood at a distance, staring, thinking of nothing really and once when I had gone to Chris's before a morning class to borrow a book and she had walked from his room to the bath, sleepy and unaware of me, wearing only someone's long denim shirt, a shirt too long to be Chris's. I was aware of each part of her body against mine as I moved easily in and out of her and of the way in which she moved against me, oblivious within her own sensation. Her thighs opened a bit more and I entered her more deeply and our eyes opened and deepened with the discovery. I laughed a little. I fastened my teeth gently on her ear lobe and she turned her face half away from me. The tendons of her neck stretched against her skin. Her hair was darkening with sweat in the places where it met her face. Our bodies were joined everywhere by the slick film of our sweat. I felt her breath go rapid and I felt her body contract quickly against mine I knew she was about to come. We pressed ourselves closer together and I buried my face in the smell of her hair and as she came I relaxed and soon came too. It seemed special and deep and afterwards I felt weak as if we had poured ourselves into her. We stayed joined together, holding each other up, our thighs began to grow sticky as we ran out of her. I kissed her eyelids and said she was beautiful and she smiled.

I heard the wind as it pushed through the leaves beyond the window, rustling them against each other. There was a clean sound of hammers striking nails somewhere far down the street. The nails squeaked as they entered the wood. A dog barked. Everything smelled beautiful. The air blowing through the open window brought the vague scent that came from the life of the trees. The lingering hint of Liz's perfume mixed with the more acid smell of our mingled scents. I heard and felt the trembling energy of our breathing. Her head lay on my shoulder and I kissed her damp hair. I felt incredibly alive. All the shit was cleaned out of my mind and body and I felt only good.

We stayed locked that way till my prick shrank slowly out of her and then there was nothing to do but clean ourselves up as well as we could. I wiped the semen from between her legs with my shorts and she seemed comfortable with my touch. There was a physical ease between us but there was nothing to say. I kissed her gently again but her body was growing stiff. She was thinking about something else. I suggested we get cup of coffee and at last reluctantly we dressed and left this white room.

We stopped at one of the huge modern science buildings on the campus and in the second basement we found a vast coffee shop that was of full of college kids. I felt completely out of place there. This was not where we should be at all. The walls were white concrete blocks covered with bright posters of places like St. Tropez and Majorca, total fantasies on this limestone landscape. We found a table away from the others. I had to switch seats because the plastic back of the first one I tried cracked ominously under my weight. The coffee was wrong too. We ought to be drinking champagne. Liz was growing more nervous by the minute. She would be a total wreck soon and I didn't know what to do. I reached across the table and stroked her forearm gently. I had a feeling that she was actually vibrating with her nerves. "You're beautiful, Liz," I said. "I'm glad we had a chance to do it. You've always been very, very special to me."

She looked up and for a minute I could see myself reflected in her brown eyes. Her curly hair was still tangled and matted against her ear and cheek. I felt the gentle stirring of an erection beginning.

"How can it be a bad thing?" I said. "No one who understood it would think . . . and Chris won't . . . I mean I'm glad it happened."

"Turner," she said, "you are babbling."

I thought about that for a while.

"Yeah, I am."

"This damn place reminds me of the lab," she said. "Let's get out of here."

She got up quickly and walked out. We walked up a couple of flights of stairs and through a small lobby where someone was giving a reception for bearded people with pipes. She walked quickly out onto the broad green common between the limestone giants. I was struggling to keep from falling behind her and wondering what was going to happen next. We turned the corner of the building and suddenly we were faced with a long hillside running down towards a pleasant park with a small pond and a few trees. From here you could see the roofs of the houses which had spread out into the countryside as the university grew. The limestone facade of the new building that peaked over the crest of the hill seemed like a gentle monster.

Suddenly Liz started to run.

"Damn," she shouted, "damn, damn, damn."

She waved her arms about and spun a few tight circles like a child imitating a ballerina. Her pirouettes grew more frantic till at last she collapsed on her back, arms spread wide on the grass.

So what's to understand? I thought.

I followed her down the hill and sat down on the grass beside her and put my hand on her leg. She was calmer now and she had kind of a sad smile.

"I really don't blame you for anything, Larry," she said, folding her hands deliberately behind her head, "but I wish you wouldn't touch me."

I removed my hand and we were quiet for a while.

"Did you know this was going to happen?" she asked.

"I suppose so. From sometime yesterday at least. Did you?"

"Last night. When you touched my hand on the porch." There was another long silence then but it was more comfortable. I really did want her but there wasn't much I could do. Fight a duel, perhaps? Make a long speech in iambic pentameter?

"Are you going to tell him?"

I asked.

"No, I don't think so. I don't think it would bother him and then we would be in a hell of a mess wouldn't we?"

I decided I owed her a gratuitous gesture.

"Are you going to leave him?" I asked.

"No, not now. Not because of this certainly."

There was a long silence. It's a funny thing about getting the girl - last night I was sure I could read her thoughts and now I had no idea at all what was going on in her mind.

"You know," she said, "when Linda told me about you and Melissa I thought she was making it up. I thought that she was being catty but I can see now she was really hurt by something real."

There wasn't anything too surprising about that but it was good to know for sure.

"It was hardly more than one night," I said. "And well after Skyler entered the picture."

"You know what I was thinking?" she said. "I was thinking I always considered you to the most moral guy I knew. In your peculiar way. And in the last year now, you've gotten yourself involved with your lover's best friend and your best friend's lover."

"It wouldn't occur to someone who wasn't moral," I said. "It's our peculiar genius."

In the car as we headed back towards the house, I made some casual remarks about the scenery but it was useless. Liz was growing constantly more distant. I put my hand lightly on her knee and she just looked at it. I tried to find something to say that would cut through this distance but it was getting very complicated. Finally she broke the silence. Her voice was trembling with anger or perhaps frustration.

"Why me?" she asked. "Why did you pick me?'

Apparently I had found the whole thing more spontaneous and mutual than she had. Well, why indeed? I wondered I thought of the concept of Occam's Razor - in the face of many adequate explanations, choose the simplest. Lust?

"Besides the fact that you appeal to me? I can explain it dozens of ways. Which would you prefer? The most innocent or the most perverse? They're equally convincing."

"You know," she said. "You could have lots of women. You're so sensitive to things. I know it from the way our friends talk about you."

Did she mean to suggest her own feelings were different? I decided she did not. I decided to risk giving her a chance to accuse me of every sort of irresponsibility. Beat me so we can talk.

"You know," I said. "I'm leaving soon. In just an hour or so and you know I'm tactful. This might as well not be real at all."

There was a silence long enough to make me nervous and then she said with a startlingly gentle laugh. "Yes, and I did enjoy it."

"Yeah, so did I," I said and I moved my hand up her leg, affectionately.

"No," she said. "Remember it never happened."

Chris got back to the house about ten minutes after we did. He was pleasantly stoned and full of news about people I didn't know. Liz was unflustered and calm as she talked about some gossip she had picked up at the university. I was surprised to find myself feeling piqued at being excluded from their conversation. While Liz fixed us some lunch, Chris and I talked with nostalgic ease about the latest work of a sculptor we had both known in school. I was very pleased with myself. I felt absolutely nerveless. After lunch, Chris lit up another thick joint, which I declined; saying I wanted to be clear headed to drive. After a while I made a point of looking at my watch. Chris didn't need any further prompting.

"Your stuff is in your car," he said. "Same stuff as last night. It's in the shoe box under the back seat."

Chris the magician. "Very efficient," I said.

"We can get it if you want to check it."

"Of course not," I said. Chris had never cheated me and I was sure he never would.

"I put a little extra in it to round it out."

"So what was it? One hundred and forty five for five."

"Exactly right."

I gave him seven crisp twenties but I had to fumble to make the rest of it with three ones and change. He folded the cash into his pants pockets without counting it and thanked me.

I collected my bag and we went out to stand by my car. The day was warm and clear. It was beautiful. I ought to reach Chicago just about sunset, I thought. The city would be stretching below, immense, fierce and red as if aflame for the moment at the apogee of the Skyway Bridge. I asked myself again why I had ever left this serene place but this time I had a little better idea. It was hard to decide what to say for farewells. I invited them to visit me and they accepted but it is unlikely they will ever come. Finally, I took Liz's hand and kissed her lightly on the lips. It was the kind of kiss you get from an old friend. I shook hands firmly with Chris but then our eyes met and with the same sudden impulse that marked our greeting the day before, we hugged each other, firmly, warmly, pressing our bodies close together and I remembered again that though I was the larger man Chris had the wiry strength of a farmer or a carpenter. His hands are large and hard. He stepped away from me then and smiled his unfathomable stoned smile and I got into the little Fiat.

"Good-by."

As I drove down the gravel road, I watched them in the mirror through the soft haze of gravel dust my wheels raised as they walked together back towards the house, arms folded, talking easily, familiarly. It seemed that their world had been unaltered by my visit. I wondered could it be that we had all become so civilized, so advanced that I could indeed pass through this place like a rock passing through water without adding a ripple to the dark tranquil surface. Yes, perhaps. Perhaps Liz now has her balancing secret, her revenge for Terri Riatt and perhaps Chris, fooled and unknowing, would be unhurt. Perhaps.

When I reached the highway, I stopped for a moment. My nerves were starting to catch up with me. I rubbed my forehead firmly to help me relax and I took a long deep breath. My nose filled with the sharp, erotic, acid smell of Liz and I, rising up from my body as vividly as if she were still beside me. With a jolt I thought to myself, Turner, you're babbling.

I felt like a smug criminal who suddenly sees the obvious, overlooked clue lying uncovered on the tabletop. I felt enraged at my own simple-mindedness, my own post-coital smugness. The pride I took in my own cleverness at keeping my hand from shaking seemed ridiculous when there was a danger of dozens of changes that would betray the game,

I had tried to find the flesh within my dream world and turned us all into strangers. This was not some magical place that turned clerks into Rembrandts or made perceptive people omniscient. It was simply people on the land. Unadorned. Everything seemed realer to me now, in a way that is hard to convey. It was realer in my mind but suddenly unkind. This new view of things was like some wiser, ugly sister to the young beauty of my sentimental images; it was clearly more valid, realer, but much harder to love. I wanted a glass or two of bourbon but this land now seemed too strange a place to go suddenly derelict in.

I tried to imagine my next meeting with Chris. Would we still be able to feel that compulsive warmth that led us to embrace? Perhaps. But perhaps it would be all evasions, sparring; a veiled game to determine what was really known or guessed. Would the memory of our good times together be undermined by new doubts about what we could count on from one another? Perhaps now the element of raw competition between old friends would stand out - unrepressed. Perhaps, to use Chris's word, we all become a little more advanced. We had all gone just a little deeper into things and I wondered if a weekend of small talk and kindness wouldn't have served us better. Intimacy undermining intimacy.

I turned the tape player on and the rich sounds of the opera filled the small car again. This was not just something between Chris and I, I realized. I tried to find some clear memories of what had happened that morning. I wanted to find some strong image of Liz and I to cement the experience in my memory. I thought of the way her face had looked, sweating and turned half away, the tendons in her neck stretching beneath her tanned skin. I thought of at last seeing her naked breasts and of the way the muscles in her arms had tensed when she had struggled with the stuck window and then I was surprised by another memory, something from so long before that I was truly startled to remember it. It had been one of those moments of understanding between Liz and I, one of those moments so clear and incisive and so hard to carry back into the texture of your life. On a spring day, years before, we had all been together with many others at a party on a farm farther south in the wooded, rolling country. There had been a lot of drinking and a lot of smoking and at some point I had overheard Chris attack Liz on some small point and I had come to her defense with such energy that Chris was plainly surprised. An hour or so later I found myself quite stoned and a little worried about some kind of reprisal from Chris. I excused myself from the crowd, saying I wanted to take a walk. I remember that it was a hot day and we had been playing volleyball so I was shirtless, my jeans were heavy with sweat, my long hair curled and damp and my chest beaded with sweat. As I started to walk down the hill away from the house towards the woods and a small creek, I heard Liz behind me. "Can I walk with you?" she said and I nodded. I was too stoned to say much but after a while we came to a place where the creek trickled slowly over a flat ledge of limestone and then dropped with a tiny two-foot waterfall to form a near prefect semi-circular pool, with a radius of six feet or so, before the stream trickled on down the hill through the woods. We sat down on the limestone ledge - she on one side of the narrow stream, I on the other. We let our feet hang down into the cool water. We were silent for a while; each of us lost in our own thoughts yet still we were very close. In our silence, I felt we were sharing something, something so fine that it would be crude to break it by trying to talk. I stepped down into the pool to splash water up around my chest and shoulders to wash away the film of sweat and dust and when I finished I watched the way the still water rippled away from the place where I had disturbed the surface and I sat down again on the ledge. Liz began to move her feet slowly back and forth sending a smooth pattern of waves moving out from her feet to the edge of the pool, perfect, expanding semi-circular waves out to dissolve at the edge of pool and I, entranced with the pleasure she seemed to be taking in the motion, began to do the same thing and soon the circular waves emanating from the motion of our feet began to intersect and in the points they met they formed a new pattern, beautiful and doubly intricate, a rippling surface of intermingling waves.

The gentle interaction of our paddling feet turned the water into something that was for the moment marvelously complex, a fractured glistening surface, before the muddy water swirled on down stream, heading towards . . . turbulence? Fibrillation? I felt suddenly clearheaded, free of the dope or freed by it and I said to Liz. "There, that's what I would like to show in my painting. Interstices. Synergism. The new patterns."

She was quiet then and I remembered the desire I had to kiss her then. It was a desire I was far too shy to act on then. After a time she began to move her feet faster and faster until the small, moon-shaped pool was chaotic with the motion of waves and then she smiled and at that moment when I felt I finally had the courage to kiss her, she swung her legs delicately up from the water, her tanned skin dripping (I remembered being startled by the slight stubble of dark hair on her legs.) She wiped her legs dry on the grass beside the path and walked up the dusty path towards the house. I remember thinking foolishly at that moment that the only thing that was keeping me from becoming her lover was shyness.

Clear memories. I stopped the car on the shoulder of the narrow road and took a cigar from my bag. I lit it with the lighter from the car and stared out across the fields while the stereo blared out the pure reaches of La Trotavore. The music slipped out the open windows to dissipate and blend above the wide and open fields with distant barking of dogs and the cry of lazy crows. Full voiced lovers singing out their feelings for one another from a dungeon. Her voice for a moment higher than his then joined. The combination was perfect, better than anything I thought I had known. I reached to turn up the volume but it wouldn't go any higher. A single final matched note, beautifully matched voices, a high moving harmony. Veritas, I thought and then,