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“Yes? And if I had announced I was leaving Matija, you would have run away with me? As stupid as I am? Yes? As bad an accent as I have? Without all the life that I am bound by? Of course it’s you that makes marriage to Matija possible—but it’s Matija that makes it work for
you
.”
    “So you stay with Matija to make me happy.”
    “As much as anything—yes!”
    “And that explains the other men as well.”
    “But it does!”
    “And Christa?”
    “Of course it was for you. You know it was for you. To please you, to excite you, to give you what you wanted, to give you the woman you never had! I love you, Mickey. I love being dirty for you, doing everything for you. I would give you anything, but I can no longer endure you to have other women. It hurts too much. The pain is just too great!”
    As it happened, since picking up Christa several years back Sabbath had not really been the adventurous libertine Drenkaclaimed she could no longer endure, and consequently she already had the monogamous man she wanted, even if she didn’t know it. To women other than her, Sabbath was by now quite unalluring, not just because he was absurdly bearded and obstinately peculiar and overweight and aging in every obvious way but because, in the aftermath of the scandal four years earlier with Kathy Goolsbee, he’d become more dedicated than ever to marshaling the antipathy of just about everyone as though he were, in fact, battling for his rights. What he continued to tell Drenka, and what Drenka continued to believe, were lies, and yet deluding her about his seductive powers was so simple that it amazed him, and if he failed to stop himself it was not to delude himself as well, or to preen himself in her eyes, but because the situation was irresistible: gullible Drenka hotly pleading, “What happened? Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out,” even while he eased into her the way Nera pretended in the Polaroid to be penetrating Silvija. Drenka remembered the smallest detail of his exciting stories long after he had forgotten even the broad outline, but then he was as naively transfixed by her stories, the difference being that hers were about people who were real. He knew they were real because, after each new liaison had got under way, he would listen on the extension while, beside him on the bed, holding the portable phone in one hand and his erection in the other, she drove the latest lover crazy with the words that never failed to do the trick. And afterward, each of these sated fellows said to her exactly the same thing: the ponytailed electrician with whom she took baths in his apartment, the uptight psychiatrist whom she saw alternate Thursdays in a motel across the state line, the young musician who played jazz piano one summer at the inn, the nameless middle-aged stranger with the JFK smile whom she met in the elevator of the Ritz-Carlton . . . each one of them said, once he had recovered his breath—and Sabbath heard them saying it, craved their saying it, exulted in their saying it, knew it himself to be one of the few wonderfully indisputable, unequivocal truths a man could live by—each one conceded to Drenka, “There’s no one like you.”
    And now she was telling him that she no longer wished to be this woman unanimously acknowledged as unlike all others. At fifty-two, stimulating enough still to make even conventional men reckless, she wanted to change and become somebody else—but did she know why? The secret realm of thrills and concealment, this was the poetry of her existence. Her crudeness was the most distinguishing force in her life, lent her life its distinction. What was she otherwise? What was
he
otherwise? She was his last link with another world, she and her great taste for the impermissible. As a teacher of estrangement from the ordinary, he had never trained a more gifted pupil; instead of being joined by the contractual they were interconnected by the instinctual and together could