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the weight of a hundred seconds always turns her head.
    Though clearly a matter of opinion, Karen’s gaze seems just as lost as it is “surfeit with love and longing.” [17—Max C. Garten’s “100 Looks” in Vogue, v. 185, October 1995, p. 248.] The reasons are in part answered when at last Navidson’s car pulls into the driveway. Karen hardly attempts to contain her relief. She instantly leaps up from the mini candle factory and dashes from the room. Seconds later—no doubt thinking better of herself— she returns.
    “Daisy, hold off using the scissors until I get back.”
    “Mommy!” Daisy shrills.
    “You heard what I said. Chad keep an eye on your sister.”
    “Mommy!” Daisy squealing even louder.
    “Daisy, mommy also wants you to look after your brother.”
    This seems to appease the little girl, and she actually settles down, smugly eyeing Chad even as she continues to snip wicks.
    Strangely enough, by the time Karen reaches Navidson in the foyer, she has quite effectively masked all her eagerness to see him. Her indifference is highly instructive. In that peculiar contradiction that serves as connective tissue in so many relationships, it is possible to see that she loves Navidson almost as much as she has no room for him.
    “Hey, the water heater’s on the fritz,” she manages to say.
    “When did that happen?”
    She accepts his brief kiss.
    “I guess last night.”
     
    [ 18 — I got up this morning to take a shower and guess what? No fucking hot water. A pretty evil discovery especially when you’re depending on that watery wake-up call, me being massively dehydrated from a long night drunk my road-dog Lude and I winged our way onto last night. As I’m remembering it now, we somehow ended up at this joint on Pico, and soon thereafter found ourselves in conversation with some girls wearing black cowboy hats, supposedly lost in their own private-blend of brain- hatching euphoria—Thank you Herbal Ecstasy—prompting us to put a little Verbal Ecstasy on them which would, as it turned out, ultimately lead them giggling into the night.
    I’ve forgotten now what we did exactly to get the whole thing rolling. I think Lude started giving one of them a trim, whipping out his scissors which he always has on hand, like old gunslingers I guess always had on hand their Colts—there he goes, snipping locks & bangs, doing a great fucking job too, but hey he’s a pro, and all of it in the dark too, on a barstool, surrounded by dozens of who knows who, fingers & steel clicking away, tiny bits of hair spitting off into the surrounding turmoil, the girls all nervous until they see he really is the shit and then they’re immediately chirping “me, next” & “do me” which is too easy to remark upon, so instead Lude & I remark upon something else which this time round is all about some insane adventure I supposedly had when I was a Pit Boxer. Mind you I’d never heard that term before nor had Lude. Lude just made it up and I went with it.
    “Aw come on, they don’t want to hear about that,” I said with about as much reluctance as I could reasonably feign.
    “No Hoes, you’re wrong,” Lude insisted. “You must.”
    “Very well,” I said, starting then to recall for everyone how at the lonely age of nineteen I had climbed off a barge in Galveston.
    “Actually I escaped,” I improvised. “See, I still owed my crazy
    Russian Captain a thousand dollars for a wager I’d lost in Singapore.
    He wanted to murder me so I practically had to run the whole way to Houston.”
    “Don’t forget to tell them about the birds,” Lude winked. He was just throwing shit at me, something he loved doing, keeping me on my toes.
    “Sure,” I mumbled, stretching for an explanation. “This barge I’d been on was loaded with dates and pounds of hash and an incredible number of exotic birds, all of it, of course, illegal to transport, but what did I know? It didn’t exactly affect me. And anyway, I wasn’t