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“Darling, where the devil are you? Bulgarian documentary after all? You’re probably asleep, you lucky pup. I am absolutely shattered. These sods are very much worse than anticipated, truly appalling. Loads of desperate drinking—drowning my sorrows. I feel absolutely
awful.
All right, darling. See you tomorrow.
Bonne nuit. Schlaffen-sie gut, ja?
Lots of love. G’night, my bride. Night.”

Jean pulled Dan’s memory card from her pocket and slipped it into Mark’s camera. First came the picture that was on Dan’s sleek laptop in the flat. She thumbed to the next one, technically the preceding, moving back in time, praying for a Tuscan landscape. He wasn’t lying, he didn’t get her face, but he got pretty well all the rest of her. Hard to see in this tiny window, but it was Jean all right, on her back, a bent arm across her eyes and the sheet down by her knees. Oh no, oh no, oh
no.
She felt the prickles moving up her neck and across her scalp.

He must have been standing on the bed with his legs either side of her to get this one—her body smack in the center, closer up. She was headless, as if she was a decapitated Greek bust, her arms outstretched off-screen, cruciform.
When?
Was that how she slept, or had he arranged her? How could she be so
asleep? Was she drugged? Though why would he drug her
after…
and how, for this next one, did he manage to roll her over without waking her? Come to think of it, and these shots confirmed it, he did seem particularly enamored of her backside. Live and learn—a whole new idea of herself she’d have to get around to thinking about.

An earlier photograph showed just the back of her head, shot from above, her hair twisted in a coil down her back like a tornado viewed from a great distance, but, turned around, it looked like a struggling vine, inching upward. Her head was at the bottom, then her shoulders, forming the base of a triangle cropped near the top at the waistline. It looked as if she might be praying. Only she wasn’t. The next one, with her again on all fours, framed the open butterfly of her bottom and waist and shoulders. The music! He’d gotten up to put it on, stirring Brazilian music, and just as he’d instructed she hadn’t moved. Head down like a swayback nag at the trough, her position resigned. Drunk. She was studying the details of each shot, one at a time, attempting to hold at bay the bigger picture: the consequences of these images, now on this camera, but also in Dan’s computer and therefore, if he chose, out in the world.

The next picture of Jean filled the screen: shot from above but also from
behind
—the contemplative one-eyed point of view, as Dan might say (she’d been amused by his comradely relationship with his cock, whom he’d portrayed as a deluded philosopher-king). Jean contemplated her own raised ass. Well, now she knew how she looked from behind.

At last, it was someone else’s turn. Unable for the moment to think about what she’d seen, she kept looking at the next and the one after, mechanically moving her thumb.

Ah, here was the landscape. So the great northern Mapplethorpe could also do holiday snaps. A ski trip evidently, the classic white peak rising off darkly melting lower slopes, scenic alpine shot, could be the Matterhorn. That black oval in the middle, maybe it was a cable car. She clicked on. The next shot was of a pale girl in profile, sticking her tongue out. Oh dear, sweetheart or chalet girl? At least it wasn’t Maya, whom Jean had vaguely been expecting. Her skin was fluorescent, her red pigtails glowed. On the end of her tongue was a big white blob—more snow. She was sheathed in a figure-hugging dark strapless dress, and her hands were also dark, black or brown, as if in long evening gloves. Jean was getting impatient. She clicked on.

In the next one, the same girl was laughing with her eyes closed and her shoulders raised—oh my God, it was Shirley from the pub, from the
office.
The ends of her pigtails were now dark. Jean looked closely, but it was hard to see, her arms and hands and shoulders were all brown, like she’d been dipped. The next one was just plain Shirley, white as a star, fully frontal, inanely smiling. Her breasts looked even bigger without the fluffy pink sweater, without the brown dress. And there was something off about them—not just that one was marginally more enormous than the other. Seemed he’d done something with the color setting and given her bright red nipples, or maybe they’d been messily colored over with lipstick. She was afraid the next picture would be of a mouth with that lipstick on it, and she was miserable, right back where she’d been with Giovana. It hadn’t
felt
like that with Dan.

But the next shot was Shirley again, marshmallow white, overexposed, and bending her head, hair part like a line of chalk. There was something between her breasts. A
banana
? Oh,
Christ.
This was the making, or the unmaking, of an ice-cream sundae, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and Maraschino nipples. What was she going to
do
?

Jean thought of the moment when she read the first letter from Giovana and of her resolve to tell Mark, of how that
resolve vanished before she got the chance. While he was locked in the can. She forced herself to think of the months lost in her “researches,” a torturous exercise whatever spin you wanted to put on it, and so
aging,
as if she had voluntarily assumed his extra years. And the entire unfinished episode—the long, infecting soak in his dirty water—might have been avoided if she’d just called him on it right then, that morning on the terrace.

No bath, no breakfast, no nap—she was going to call Dan,
now.

His machine began answering before a breathless voice interrupted. “’Lo?”

Jean couldn’t help imagining he was with someone else, what else would wind him on a Sunday morning? The thought gave her fury a boost. “I should call the police,” she said, not quite sure where that came from.

“Whoa! Why would you want to go and do that? Didn’t you have a good time, Mrs. Hubbard?”

“I had a good time, Dan. I had a very good time. Just out of curiosity, was that your idea, or did my husband suggest it? Sponsoring a little cheer—spreading the wealth. Where is he this weekend anyway, do you want to tell me that? Come on, Dan, surely no secrets between us
now.”

“Whoa again—what’s all this?” It was his turn to talk someone down off a roof. “I spoke to him from his
Schloss
not an hour ago—seriously bad weather, apparently—hasn’t he called you? And as for last night, I thought it was
your
idea actually—and what a very good one it was, too. Come on now, Jean, you’re not really cheesed off about my little wake-up card, are you? A
thank-you
card. I didn’t mean any harm. You look…mesmerizing. You are, you know.”

She couldn’t stop herself asking, “Why are you so out of breath?”

“Believe it or not, I just dashed across the flat to answer the phone—some nutter calling me just as I was beginning a lovely kip. Not so fit, you see. False advertising.”

This wasn’t going as she’d planned. He had to be stopped. “How could you
do
that?”

“Aw, Jean. If you want to come back and shoot some different ones, why, hmm, checking my diary here, it seems I am available, yes, puzzlingly so.”

“How could you do that to
Shirley
?”

“Ah, Shirley. Bit greedy, our Shirl. But we aim to please.”

“You’re an animal,” Jean said humorlessly, pressing her lips together when she’d spat out the words, her throat constricting.

“So they tell me. Hubbard—Mr. Hubbard, that is—he especially likes to say that, though I have to admit, until now I always took it as a compliment.”

“I want those pictures off your computer.”

“Sounds as though you’ve already got them off my computer, Mrs. H. Come on, Jean, it was all in good fun. And Shirley, she’s a big lass. And I don’t just mean—”

“That’s e
nough.
Don’t you ever take a break?”

“Actually, I was trying to, but this mad lady from the islands called me wanting my head. As it were.”

She clenched her teeth. “Look Dan, I’m sorry I got a little upset. I’m sure you meant no harm. But you can’t
do
that. Really, I’m asking you. Pretty please. Do you promise to delete them all?”

“You’re the boss.”

His wife, actually. Would he ever give it up? She was searching for a lighter tone, but what was the point? Dan would do what Dan would do.

“Look,” she said. “I enjoyed last night more than you know. Well, I think you do know. All this other stuff just spoils it for me—it really freaks me out.”

“Don’t
worry,
Jean. I am not out to get you. It was heaven, and I think you’re great. In fact, I was going to have a kip and then call you and ask you out for lunch…”

“Are you listening to me? That’s
it.
Let it go. If you’re any kind of friend, just let it go.”

“Such a waste, that’s all I can say to
that.
Listen, you are not to worry. Yes, I will wipe the pictures. Regretfully but fully. I promise.”

Jean didn’t know why, but she believed him. “So, I guess we won’t need to speak about this again,” she said with overkill. “Anyway I’m going back to St. Jacques next week. Soon as I get my results.”

Desperate last shot: cancer. Please comply with my dying wish. There was a thoughtful silence from Dan. Had he already forgotten? Or was he derailed by aesthetic, even professional, contemplation of her titless torso? Maybe this was supposed to be a
grave
silence? If that’s what you’re after, Jean thought, you can forget it. You’re not made for solemnity, Dan. Just to nail it, she added, “Mark is so fond of you. Like a son—or a naughty little brother I guess.”

“Well, I’m fond of
him,
” Dan said without a hint of irony. “Though not quite so fond as I am of you.”

Jean, in the bath with her hair piled high and pinned by a toothbrush, looked down at her body, all of it submerged except the two islands floating in this clear green sea, a lone survivor at the center of each. At least they had each other for company—for now. The biopsy spot was sore, sorer than the other sore spots. But sore was okay with Jean.

Closing her eyes she thought of Dan’s tongue power-coating his handful of female flesh, nipples not so solitary then, and a shiver ran through her—not like last night’s exquisite tremors and quivers, but the shakes of a rapidly advancing disease, one mocked by her oblivion-seeking, late-night self. She wanted to test for other, nonbodily bruises—a moral or spiritual biopsy—but how did you do that?

Isolation: this seemed the most likely immediate outcome of her having crossed the border with Dan, barring anything truly horrible from him. She supposed she’d know just how isolated she was as soon as she saw Mark, if there was a new veil between them. Even more than pictures of herself on the office laptops, this was the consequence she most feared: her own revulsion for her world, for all that she had. Auto-eviction. But fear was a poison. Jean thought of those hugging machines they use on cows before they’re led off to slaughter. Nothing to do with animal welfare—fear is toxic, makes the meat taste foul.

She watched the concentric ripples on the water’s surface made by a toe that looked out like a periscope and then changed its mind. Had Dan made her feel any better about Mark’s excursion, compared, say, with all her busybodying around the Internet? Yes, he had. The impulse to strike out on
any
independent path had to be strengthening, if not exactly cheering. But why feel better about jumping onto a sinking ship? She thought of a small, hard, embroidered pillow, one of those decorative fortune cookies Phyllis collected, which said
IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME I’M GOING WITH YOU
.

Still, last night hadn’t felt related to Mark and her marriage. And not even to Mark and Giovana. Maybe this was just Jean on the brink of forty-six and it didn’t
mean
anything. Or maybe this was her true personality coming through, the way alcoholism showed in some people around thirty-five. Jean the philobat, on the pattern of acrobat, the type that prefers to cope
alone with difficult, uncertain situations. Though of course she hadn’t been alone.

She had to expect that nothing would ever be the same again. But to her intermittent great sadness, nothing ever was. In fact, the whole night was a kind of exercise in nostalgia. Hungry kisses—remember those? Well, they were still there—even more amazing, they were available to her and she’d remembered how it all went. As if she’d stepped straight back into a beloved entertainment from an earlier time, like square dancing.

Of course she was afraid, with good reason. Because along with mortification there had been the shock of pleasure. Even now, with everything else this aching afternoon, she felt a clear and luminous happiness, as if she’d just swum in the ocean and walked out into the hot sunshine.

T
he phone rang
twice while she was in the bath. It had to be Mark, with news of a delay. In a thin cotton nightgown and her white robe, she padded down the jute-covered steps, calm, resigned, ready for whatever came next.

Message one. 11:10 ay-em!
Victoria. She was going to sleep off the party, catch the evening train, and get back around midnight. “Don’t worry, Mum, we’ll be in a big gang.”

Message two. 11:25 ay-em!
“Darling pup, how is it that I absolutely never find you in? Listen, ghastly news, I’m afraid, divine retribution for all the remarks about my evil German hosts and woe betide me, sweetheart! The weather is seriously awful, a lead blanket of summer fog—quite common apparently, and one more reason to love Germany. But there’s no flying out of here, not for love or euros. Believe me, they’ve been trying. The entire fleet is powered by their engines, and they only own the fucking airport, but no joy! I’ll ring you later when I know more, but seems I’m grounded. Supposed to blow over by the morning, and with luck the first flight goes out of Munich into Heathrow, let’s see, gaining an hour—what, around oneish? Anyway, the contract looks secure. I should bloody well hope so. Bye, darling. Love to the Viclet. I’ll ring again later. Bye.”

She felt lower than ever as she played the message again.
Darling pup.
Two decades of canine endearments, Jean always pup or a variation of: puplet, puppling, the pupster, she supposed for her impulsiveness, her laughable early eagerness. Mark upheld the other end: floppy, shaggy, flop, and shaggers, for his hair, but also his general aspect of sniffing old dog, head out on his long neck—way out in front of his long body, doleful, worried. Oh God, what had she
done.
And above all, was it fixable? The toaster sprang loudly and the toast jumped, like Jean whenever the doorbell rang.

Hot buttered toast: this is goodness, Jean thought, making for the stairs. In fact this is ecstasy, seeing as we’re on the subject—hot buttered toast in bed, the main event to which anything else in bed was so much overwrought foreplay. Yet it was always forbidden, as if the annoyance of a few crumbs could compare with such pure and simple gratification. Mark used to bring it up on the tea tray, plus the mail—post and toast. When had he stopped doing that? About twenty-two years ago.

She reached her room too tired to feel more than grateful to be alive and alone in her own bed and, quick glance at the clock (12:12), she fell asleep immediately.

Jean awoke feeling that nothing could upset her, not even these sleep lines: carved so deep she looked in the mirror and saw a St. Jacques woodcut. She was splashing her face when the phone rang. It had to be Mark. She lunged, belly-flopping across to her side of the bed.

“Well, hello you! You’re sounding chipper.” It was Dan. “Listen, do you think I could stop by? I’m in the neighborhood.”

Jean sat rigidly erect, as if yanked upright by an invisible rope at the top of her head. He must know that Mark’s flight had been delayed—shit, he was coming back for
more.
What should she say? “No” seemed not only rude but dangerous when the man had an entire digital archive. She glanced at her watch: 4 o’clock. “Um,” she began, tiptoeing across the room and looking down through the window to see if he was standing outside.

“Just for a minute,” he said. “I have something for you.”

“Well, I was just about to have some tea,” she said. “Do you want to stop by for a couple of minutes?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She pulled on a pair of Levi’s, added a belt to feel more dressed, the tooled Western one with the worn silver buckle, and gave her hair a good brush. Perhaps to shut out any kind of reconsideration, Jean sang as she headed down the stairs barefoot—the theme from
Rawhide.
“Keep movin’, movin’, movin’—though they’re disapprovin’…” She didn’t make it to the kitchen before the bell got her out of her skin, so she opened the door almost as soon as he buzzed, giving him a little fright of his own.

“What a nice welcome.”

He grinned as he handed her a bunch of pale pink peonies. In his other hand he carried a punnet of ripe strawberries. Dan looked perfectly worn in, like his leather jacket. Jean noted this almost clinically and realized that she was seriously overrelaxed; but she could feel herself tensing down to her bare toes.

“Dan,” she said, a touch matronly, as full acknowledgment of the fruit and flowers, wondering if he’d heard her singing. “I have to call New York, but come in for a minute. I’ll make some tea. Or maybe strong coffee.” She held out a hand for the leather jacket he was unpeeling. As she tossed it over the sofa in
the front living room, she caught a whiff of his scent—leather and laundry and what else?

“Coffee’s perfect. I never did get that kip.”

“Moving in?” she said, aiming for cheerful, eyeing his bulky gym bag and wondering how she was going to get him out of here. He smiled but didn’t reply as he followed her down to the kitchen, the bag over his shoulder.

She put the peonies into the blue-and-white Spanish pitcher and took the berries, tipping them into the green bowl. He set his bag on the counter and opened it up and began to unpack his laptop—what was this? Jean did not want any more computer screen; she should say so.

“Listen, I have to call my father—family crisis.”

“I just thought you might want to have a quick last look, be sure there isn’t one you want a print of before we delete them for good.”

Such vanity! He said he’d brought something for her—was this it? The chance to order a
print
? And did he imagine she understood nothing about copies, as if by pressing the delete button with her very own finger it would be real to her as well as ceremonial, like cutting a red ribbon?

Dan took in her doubtful look, which was the best she could manage. A flash of anger crossed his tired face. “Look. I made them for
you.
For your pleasure. I don’t wank to pictures, you know. I don’t have to. What do I want them for? So I can blackmail your husband into giving me a pay rise—
radically
overdue, I might add. You have to trust me, Jean. I think you can do that. You trusted me last night.”

So, on day two, Dan was going to dispense with charm. Jean’s head ached; her hangover seemed to swell with the renewed tension. Definite mistake, letting him come over, though of course she knew it was by then a mistake well advanced, a mistake with plenty of momentum. She looked at the clock: nearly noon in New York.

“Just give me five minutes.” He ran a slide show of the pictures with a portentous sound track: Albinoni in Venice. She wanted to scream—Dan thinks he’s an
artist.
He paused on an image of her long curved spine. “Baby pinecones under snow,” he said, pointing to the light track of her vertebrae.

How could she explain to this egomaniac that she didn’t want baby pinecones, or poetry of any kind? He was so childish, waiting for praise. But she sensed his volatility. She couldn’t just throw him out. She crossed her arms, settling on a kitchen stool, and turned away from the screen. The strawberries in that bowl, she thought, they’re perfectly complementary, the red and the green. And as he no doubt intended, she remembered his ready handkerchief in the cinema, his courtly gesture as well as his unexpected reference to Desdemona. And then it occurred to her that he’d never read
Othello.
He’d seen the ad with the strawberry-patterned handkerchief, an ad for a perfume called Jalousie—she’d just seen it herself, at the airport.

“Do you mind talking a minute about Shirley,” Jean said, thinking she’d still get on top of this. “Tell me if you mind.”

“Fire away,” he said, but stopped the slide show. He looked straight at her, as if open-faced meant open-minded, sitting down on the stool beside her.

“Do you really not see the imbalance in your relationship?” she started, unnerved by his candidly unrepentant gaze. “She’s not free. You’re her
boss.
” And now something strange happened. She looked for that part of herself—the part that disapproved—and it wasn’t there. “Like students and teachers,” she went on tinnily. “Like hookers and their clients. You
pay
her. Don’t kid yourself about consenting adults. It’s not a level field.”

“Actually, we hardly pay our interns anything at all. Hubbard’s orders. Does that help?”

Jean smiled but said, “No, actually it doesn’t. It’s the balance of power and you know what I mean.” But
she
didn’t know what she meant either, not anymore.

“Well, the balance of power is always a story in these things, isn’t it, how it changes. Keeps us all interested, right? Shirley has her power. And so do you. On the page and elsewhere.”

Dan ate a handful of strawberries. Then, looking around for something more satisfying, reached for a banana and ate that, and then a hunk ripped from a baguette. “I’m famished. Do you mind?” he asked, his methodical circular grinding like the vortex of a waste disposal. Jean shook her head and just waited, sensing he was midsentence as well as midbite. He was still swallowing when he spoke.

“Why can you not accept that Shirley
likes
it? Surely you’re not going to be offended by bad
taste.
I mean, are we communicating? You will rush to tell me about the love deficit in her childhood, but I will tell
you
that this is a girl who’s got to have something in her mouth at all times. And where’s the harm in that? Makes the world go round. Surely you’re not totally mystified, Mrs. H.” His tongue was gliding across his teeth, a prominent bulge moving under his lip. She blushed and continued to blush. But she battled on.

“It’s not the same between you and me. I mean, I’m older than you. You work for my husband. I make my own living. Sure, you’re freer. In every way. But I’m richer.” And smarter, she thought to herself. “Parity, that’s the thing.” She was not sure she wanted to invite such comparisons—and if she was so smart, what was Dan Manning doing in her kitchen? She shifted the focus. “And all the other interns?”

“None. Not a one. Or not lately. Believe me, most of them have much more promising boyfriends. Hedge-funders with summer cars… Can you please explain to me, since you are mistress and supreme diviner of the female psyche—not to mention the
male
psyche, though no extra points for that—why a convertible is
the
undying aphrodisiac for women?”

“Actually, women hate convertibles. They fuck up their hair.” But he wasn’t even listening.

“Now, let me see, interns… Apart from Shirley, we have Sareen, who sadly is married, and Leslie. Who’s a bloke, I think.”

“So not resisting on principle, then.”

“My principle is one of happiness, if that can be a principle. And regular health checks. Yes, making people happy, including, occasionally, old Bert here. Bert?” he said loudly, talking to his bunched crotch. “You’re good people! Actually, until recently even
I
had a real girlfriend. As you will have gathered.” He sighed at her memory.

“So what happened to her anyway?” While she thought: What happened to me? Why did he think she
gathered
anything about his love life, apart from the segment that featured herself? She had to get him out of here.

“Thought you’d never ask. She moved back to Brazil. We had a laugh, you know? But in the end she didn’t really travel, if you get what I mean. From a poor village near Ouro Preto. You can take the girl out of the village…but
you,
you’re a mystery. Innocent, truly. Yet so wonderfully playful, so
daring
—a very compelling combination, if I may say so.”

Had she been so daring? She could feel her throat coloring and looked at the clock: time’s up. She rose, hoping he’d get the point. And he stood up, too.

“
This
is what you saw them on?” he said, inspecting Mark’s digital camera, and shaking his head. “Pitiful.” He switched it on to see where she’d gotten to. “I see you made it to dessert. Did you realize this is a little film?”

She did not.

“Perhaps you’d like to see it, before I show you the flawless masterpiece I spent the morning editing.”

“Not really.”

“Oh, come on. It doesn’t last a minute.” He laughed, turning to the computer, searching through his files. “It’s embarrassingly quick. Let’s see what you think.”

Dan looked at the screen, unmoved, as if he was showing his staff a mock-up for an ad when what they had before them, with full sound, was Shirley noisily sucking his cock. At least she assumed it was Dan’s. Jean was appalled, and impressed—the steady application, the forthright energy, made her think, ridiculously, of the refrain from that old book of Vic’s,
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt:
We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it! Yes, she’d done this, and in the course of her researches she’d seen it being done. But never before had she watched something like this with someone else, let alone someone she’d done God knows what with the night before. Was that how
she
looked, like a dope-eyed farm animal bobbing before the farmer? Every now and again there was a fist in the frame, Dan holding the girl’s hair, controlling the rhythm—but this was not remotely how she pictured herself: as something ethereal and elegant and goddessy.

Yes, that was Dan. And this, she thought, was Jean: watching pornography with Dan, watching pornography with Dan in it with Dan…she could even feel a twinge of mechanical lust. But what kind of man would show a woman such a scene, so utterly confident of her appreciation? This was going to be much harder than she anticipated, managing the new Dan—hideously entitled.

“Same thing for lunch every single day,” he said, shaking his head again. “And unlike your own, this is a conscience not bothered. Healthy girl. What
Shirley
worries about is the calorie content of all that jizz. Hey, you’re the health writer.” He looked over at her companionably. “Is it true that one load of spunk’s got twice as many calories as an ice-cream sundae?”

Jean looked at him—was he expecting her to smile fondly? Surely this wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.

“And she’s been skipping lunch for
weeks.
Only problem with that is I have to skip lunch every day too, hence the sleek form you have before you.”