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bobbed up and down. “Don’t mind a fat girl sitting on you?”
    “You’re not.” He stroked her skin. “Where did you find the sun?”
    “Havana.” She clasped her hands behind her head and arched her back. “I always have my bathing suit on, no matter where I go.”
    He raised his head, kissed her bottom; one side, the other side, the middle.
    “You are a bad boy, Jean-Claude. It’s what everyone says.” She wriggled backward until she got comfortable, then bent over him, her head moving slowly up and down. He sighed. She touched him, her hands delicate and warm. At this rate, he thought, nothing’s going to last very long.
    Worse yet, their childhood afternoons came tumbling back through his memory; skinny little dirty-minded Bibi, been at the picture books her parents hid on the top shelf. What an idiot he’d been, to believe the boys in the street: girls don’t like it but if you touch them in a certain place they go crazy—but it’s hard to find so probably you have to tie them up.
    But then, what an earthquake in his tiny brain. She wants you to feel like this, she likes it when your thing sticks up in the air and quivers. Well. Life could never be the same after that. “Thursday we all go to the Lachettes,” his mother would say in Deauville. His father would groan, the Lachettes bored him. It was a big house, on the outskirts of the seaside town, away from the noisy crowds. A Norman house with a view of the sea from an attic window. With a laundry room that reeked of boiled linen. With a wine cellar ruled by a big spider. With a music room where a huge couch stood a foot from the wall and one could play behind it. “Pom, pom, pom, I have shot Geronimeau.”
    “Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, I am dying. Tell my people—Jean-Claude!”
    From the front hall: “Play nicely, les enfants. We are all going to the café for an hour.”
    “Au revoir, Maman.”
    “Au revoir, Madame Lachette.”
    There were maids in the house, the floors creaked as they went about. Otherwise, a summer afternoon, cicadas whirred in the garden, the distant sea heard only if you held your breath.
    “You mustn’t put your finger there.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t think you’re supposed to.”
    “Oh.”
    A maid approached, the Indian scout put his ear to the waxed parquet. “Pom, pom!”
    “I die. Aarrghh.”
    Aarrghh.
    Bibi’s head moving up and down, a slow rhythm in the darkness. She was coaxing him—knew he was resisting, was about to prove that she could not be resisted. Only attack, he realized, could save him now. He circled her waist with his arms, worked himself a little further beneath her, put his mouth between her thighs. Women have taught me kindness, and this. She made a sound, he could feel it and hear it at once, like the motor in a cat. Now we’ll see, he thought, triumphant. Now we’ll just see who does what to who. Her hips began to move, rising, a moment’s pause, then down, and harder every time. At the other end of the bed, concentration wavered—he could feel it—then began to wane.
    But she was proud, a fighter. Yes, he’d set her in motion, riding up and down on the swell of the wave, but he would not escape, no matter what happened to her. It was happening; she too remembered the afternoons at the house in Deauville, remembered the things that happened, remembered some things that could have happened but didn’t. She tensed, twisted, almost broke free, then shuddered, and shuddered again. Now, the conqueror thought, let’s roll you over, with your red toenails and your white ass and—
    No. That wouldn’t happen.
    The world floated away. She crawled back to meet him by the pillows, they kissed a few times as they fell asleep, warm on a spring night, a little drunk still, intending to do it again, this time in an even better way, then darkness.
    A loud knock on the door, the voice of the concierge: “Monsieur Casson, s’il vous plaît.”
    Half asleep, he pulled on his pants and an