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architectureand houses, that it made her jumpy, unable to stand the neon, the deliberations, the sense that there was all the time in the world. He never bought a magazine, or when he did it was only after having thought about it for several days, returning to get it, not buying it on the spot, but thinking it over. You never think anything over, he said to her; you just grab at things.
    She wondered if he thought she grabbed at him. Did he feel she put her hands on him too often and she began to watch herself do it, and watch his movements towards, or, she thought more often, away. She tried to stop, but it was something she simply did as she came through the room and she had a hard time remembering to stop until it was so hard she did. She remembered to sit across from him and keep her arms at her sides. She remembered not to force her cold hands under his arm where she knew it would be warm and not to lop her leg over his just because she felt like it. And in bed she did what she realized belatedly pleased him most; she chose one posture and moved as little as possible. It was not easy or natural, indeed it was as unnatural as she could have imagined, but she thought with great effort of being like a sheet, flat and folded in a drawer; she thought of how he was aroused at her stillness and she managed because it was so arousing itself to find him in her power in this unexpected way.

    It was an affair based on the weather. They settled on it and agreed. He liked talking about the weather.It came to be for her a gesture like lying still. It was an announcement of how long they had to hold off and of what was to come. For him it was the repetition of a lost childhood, lost porches and Midwestern storms, a past that was most vivid because it had faded like old photographs. He imitated the voice of his grandfather who spoke of what the wind would do or the rain. Since they now lived in Los Angeles, these discussions, like their affair, were attenuated. There wasn’t much in the way of weather, or rather, there wasn’t much weather for them, for they had come out of the Midwest, and so what happened in the city, small increments of change, had to be sought out, obsessed over, admired and repeated. It wasn’t like the snowstorm that overtook her window when she was eleven and it wasn’t like the pelting of rain that for months hammered the tin roof and made her think she would go mad if someone didn’t come and rescue her from the rain, her parents, her fretful desires.
    As a topic, weather is so noncommittal and passes the time so lightly that when they sat waiting for the waiter to arrive at their table, they returned to it regularly. It allowed them to avoid talking about anything too personal and yet to feel, deluded or not, that they were intimately connected because they could go on together about an agreed-upon subject for so long, with so many variations and embellishments, and so they continued on in a quite accomplished pattern about the shifts in humidity, conversations which worked best in May orearly June when there was some shift. It allowed them to avoid the extreme vehemence she was prone to. Also the minimal changes in the city’s weather allowed them vast tunnels into the past which they both remembered with a fondness bordering on the fanatic or perhaps, since for neither had the present yielded up a life they could recognize, a substitution in some way. In Ohio neither would have fit in; neither would have been at home there now, and indeed she suspected that neither had been other than a misfit even then, but it was a place that together they created as normal, as home, as a place where they might, were things different, have made a life together.
    His focus was on the condensation of that odd white light before the rain, the way in which trees came to be defined by that light, harsh almost as neon over the Laundromat, greenish and pale. He remembered a porch and sat himself there time