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loud in the neighborhood silence.
    “Are you sure this is the night?” Dean says. No lights are visible.
    We walk on flat stones set in the gravel, past a concrete fishpond that has only a few dead weeds in it. I ring. A light comes on overhead, and Madame Job appears. She greets us warmly. I introduce Dean there, in the narrow hallway, with an inconvenient shaking of hands, and we walk in to the sitting room, Madame Job behind us, turning off lights.
    After dinner there are slides of Austria, taken on their last trip. Henri holds them up like coins before he projects them. Distant views of mountains. Hotels that are slightly askew. Madame Job took that one, he explains in English. She hears her name. She smiles.
    “It’s one of her best,” Henri says.
    Dean sits silently in the darkness. It was quite a good dinner–roast chicken, endive, mousse au chocolat . Her desserts are marvelous. I have the feeling she is glancing at him unseen.
    “Innsbruck,” Henri says.
    I look back at the screen. A vast, ocher city materializes in a sequence of fragments like hints of a great image which has been shattered. We are confronted with the brilliant parts. Corners of streets. Trollies. Splendid fronts of buildings too far distant to really see. I sit there receiving occasional draughts of Madame Job’s perfume. I’m surprised at its strength. There’s not much flesh for it to draw warmth from–those skinny arms. She has marvelous skin, though. Her face seems very clean.
    “Ahh,” she breathes, admiring one of the slides. She says to me,
    “ Ça c’est joli , n’est-ce pas? ”
    “ Formidable ,” I say.
    Dean sits there like a superior child. He says nothing. Of course, it’s the monotony of the whole evening that he finds incredible, that there really can be a couple like this. (Henri is forty, perhaps. Juliette about twenty-nine. But Dean has read Radiguet. Twenty-nine isn’t old.) His silence, his self-removal seem almost visible. He lights a cigarette. In that closed room with its central shaft of light, the smoke leaves his mouth with a dense brilliance. He breathes a long plume of it, bluer than ice. Henri holds another slide up to the light. We are moving east now. It seems they stopped every ten kilometers to take pictures of something.
    Dean would never go on a trip this way, I’m certain. I’m a little jealous of what he might do, I feel he’s just coasting at the moment. I imagine him on a journey to the south of France in the spring. I’m not certain who’s with him. I know he isn’t alone. They are traveling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levi’s and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams. Perhaps she’s the young whore he met in Paris he found so easy to get along with. No, that’s a banal idea. I’ve had it myself: teaching her how to dress, wear her hair, behave, speak, and all the while abusing her like a convict morning and night, some of the instruction being offered whilst in union, so to speak. Yes, she finds it amusing. She takes off her clothes with a smile. They have a relationship like the beginning of Manon Lescaut . They wander through the cities. They vanish into hotel rooms–one cannot follow. There are long silences filled with things I ache to know…
    Afterwards, sitting in the car, the leather icy, the windows opaque from the fine, endless rain, he wants to drive somewhere.
    “Where?”
    “Let’s go to Dijon,” he says.
    “Are you serious?”
    “It’s not that far.”
    I feel a little guilty, as if somehow they can sense our joy at being outside at last. It’s after eleven, but he’s completely awake. He devours my weariness.
    “Come on,” he says.
    We make our way slowly back to the main street, the wipers moving in discord, groaning as they cross the glass. It’s an absolutely dark, abandoned town at this hour, only a few cafés still open. As for the rest of it,