Brett Deitz was fourteen years old when he first saw Drea Wiseman. Even with fold creases trisecting her body and a staple rammed through her midsection, she was the most beautiful woman Brad had ever seen; at least that's what he decided after he'd jerked off to the photo for the tenth time. The magazine became the first thing Brad ever actually stole from his Dad, which is to say his father winkingly permitted Brad to "borrow" it and never asked for its return. Mom had not been consulted and Brad inferred that she did not need to be advised. It was a small, harmless conspiracy, the sort of watershed that makes a kid feel grown up.

A week before Brad turned seventeen he succeeded in nailing Joanne Pennyworth during a dusk-to-dawn horror-fest mostly composed of Hammer Films monstrosities. Neither of them cared about the endangered species status of the drive-in at which they finally achieved mutual intromission; it teetered precariously on the rim of extinction while Brad turned another corner in life that made him feel even more grown up. If there were bare tits onscreen, Brad missed them because he was sunk into the real things. Joanne was one of those rare redheads with genuinely red nipples, and later they had laughed because they had steamed up the windows of Brad's Mustang with their heat.

On three previous "dates" — so called because there was really no other word that covered social excuses for sexual contact — she had hand-jobbed him to orgasm, on a memorable fourth occasion she had fellated him and Brad had more or less returned the same courtesies to her. Each time he had climaxed he'd visualized Drea Wiseman's face from the magazine and imagined her lush body coiled or unfurled for him, as in the nine photographs (with three costume changes) that accompanied the centerspread. On the night of the drive-in Joanne had shown up bearing condoms, and when Brad climaxed he definitely saw her face and not Drea's. Joanne bit her lip when she came and Brad had fetched her a napkin from the snack bar to dab at the dot of blood; he found the tiny wound unbearably erotic. Their relationship eventually ran away to wherever young love and lust vanishes.

Brad wondered what Joanne Pennyworth was up to today. Probably brided and bred long ago, her name changed, perhaps several times. He knew now that he had not "nailed" Joanne that night; rather, she had enveloped him. The penetrative teen conquest imperative proved insufficient to describe how he had felt inside of her. He would always remember Joanne, but not in the sort of mental space he still reserved for the foldout of Drea Wiseman.

Brown hair and brown eyes in golden light, clear polish on the nails, no jewelry, and somehow she doesn't impress him as some tart who would spread for a magazine. The gaze she lends the camera is inviting, not salacious. The little stat box lists useless personal trivia, probably fabricated, but for some reason Brad believes her age as given  — twenty-one.

That would make her fifty-three or fifty-four now, he calculated upon seeing a hand-lettered sign on the Boulevard which read: SEX TAPES 3/$10 OLD PORNO OLD ADULT BOOKS "COLLECTOR'S" MAGAZINE'S. Sun-bleached videocassette sleeves littered the yellowed windows of a narrow storefront; the display inventory was a weird melange of dated hardcore, dated stereo gear, lots of incense and paraphernalia, and stacks of printed matter older than all the other junk combined. Several of these ragtag emporia fought for dominance on the Boulevard and featured no real specialty; they were part thrift shop and part junkyard with liberal dashes of dust and fake nostalgia. The employees invariably seemed stoned or spaced out enough to answer just what you see to virtually any question and their ability to make change was not to be trusted.

It was the faded cover of one of the magazines in the window that had arrested Brad's attention and within minutes he owned it. He opened it right on the street and there was Drea Wiseman again. She looked different in broad daylight, but then these magazines were traditionally perused under artificial light and in private. The colors mismatched Brad's memory of them. But it was the same magazine he'd liberated from Dad nearly three decades back.

Drea had not changed. She was still beautiful, lush, available for him. She was still twenty-one years old. She was his calendar girl, ironic because she had never posed for a calendar. She transcended age and was beyond the roll call of elapsed days, the kind you marked off with an "X" in a relentless march toward death. She was there for him, as if lying in wait for catch-up. That evening, somewhat guiltily, Brad masturbated to the photo. Later that night, less guiltily, he did it again. Drea Wiseman had made him come more than most of his girlfriends or relationships — the hormonal wish list of collisions, drive-bys and near-misses which made up the history of his love life.

Brad Deitz had gotten married at age thirty-five. The bride who had consented to this merger was named Suzanne Dalton, an advertising manager for a small publishing company who helped Brad get his first masthead gig as a magazine art director — skin, naturally. After six months on the job, Brad had louped so many layouts of naked female flesh that all he could see were the pores, bad bones, and disastrous complexions begging computer makeovers. Thousands of soulless eyes making empty come-ons to the camera. The seduction of it, the romance, had been leached away and the sterile leavings of artificially moistened genitalia in macro close-up failed to move him. He dumped his surplus of romance into his courtship of Suzanne, hence the wedding.

It was not a bad marriage. Suzanne had one restaurant for each day of the week and dined rigorously at 6 p.m. every day. Sometimes Brad had to rendezvous with her, in a synchronized Day Runner way, or risk piling up more rain checks. She always left a kitchen, a bathroom, or a closet looking undisrupted by the passage of anything human; frequently Brad's only clues were moisture in a drain, or condensation on the shower door, or one of the evenly-spaced clothes hangers repositioned a degree out of true. He allowed her tidiness to influence his habits but never gave up that residual affection for occasional clutter or spontaneity; in fact, she came to depend on his fancies to keep their lives unusual. Their lovemaking was like installments in a serial — first conventional, then outlandish, now naughtier than six months ago, next week nice and cuddly — as though it was graphed according to a blueprint Brad could not see. It was certainly varied enough. Other men complained about not wanting to even see their wives naked any more; Brad had always been curious about what their wives were saying. Brad never tired of seeing Suzanne naked, or making love to her. It was not a bad marriage.

Suzanne engineered their divorce like a military extraction from an exodus zone. They split everything evenly and fairly. She left no imbalances. She only took what was hers, and relocated to New York, where she landed further up the corporate ladder. It could reasonably be said that Suzanne left their marriage in better shape than when she had entered it, but Suzanne did everything that way. The only consolation offered by Brad's friends was on the order of you should be relieved she didn't really nail you and clean you out. No one disliked Suzanne, even after she was gone. Brad would enter what was formerly their shared apartment and sometimes wonder what was different about the place. He did not feel bad exactly; his friends had convinced him he had no reason to feel bad. But Suzanne was gone, leaving Brad alone in the company of retooled foldout girls. Later, staring at a Risqué calendar, Brad noticed that they had been husband and wife for two years exactly, to the day.

Brad tried office rebounds and quickly learned not to fuck in work territory. Suzanne sent regular checks until all their plastic was balanced out, then Brad never heard from her again, not even holiday cards. He was mooning about that, morosely, on the day he met Jennifer Spikers by literally running into her. She had brought her photography portfolio to the editorial cubicles of Risqué — one of the twenty-seven titles produced monthly under a company banner encompassing everything from Pubes! to Just Past Jailbait magazine — and had collided with Brad in the corridor to the elevators. She soon scored a richer proposal from a competing company, and Brad had scored Jennifer, and eight months after that he was mooning and morose again.

The depthless gazes of the women in the magazine spreads chided him: We told you so.

He pinballed onward for several more years in this fashion. The woman who had most recently crashed and burned on him was named Molly Sweidenvelt, and Brad was in the post-relationship process of mentally reviewing the liaisons of his entire life. One periodically tried to recall all the names, the faces; it was surprising who was abruptly forgotten or who suddenly surged forth in memory. He was walking down the street, striving to remember Jennifer's last name, when he had spotted the magazine in the window, the one featuring Drea. His first girl.

Inside what they called the "Raw Room," his co-worker Philippe had just scattered a new stack of slides on the big light-board. Every one of these vaginae wanted to be a movie star.

"Philippe, you remember Drea Wiseman?" He showed Philippe the magazine, handing it over as if it were a classified government document.

"Before my time," said Philippe. "Didn't she star in a sitcom or become a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader or something?"

"No." If she had, Brad would have had a whole shelf of her by now.

"You know who'd know? Cherique. She's been den mommy to all these exhibitionists since the dawn of recorded history. Before 1990, even."

Cherique — real name, Melissa Cordoba — was stuck somewhere in her middle 60s, dyed her hair to match her bright orange lipstick and still affected a rhinestone-bedecked cigarette holder. She called everyone "sweetie" but Brad suspected she knew not only the real names and pro names of everyone who had ever glided through the Risqué offices, but never forgot any of them. She was the Number Two of the whole enterprise; the only life form with veto power over Cherique was the Old Man himself.

"Sometimes y'know I think about doing me a book titled The X-Rated Whatever Happened To," Cherique commenced in her Los Angelicized Bronxese, firing up a Nat Sherman the color of a traffic cone. "Excepting that it would be too sad, y'know, what with all the suicides and some of the murders and then there's the AIDS. Still, sweetie, I don't think there's a day passes in this office that somebody don't ask me about whatever happened to so-and-so, and usually, if they didn't die, they wound up having kids or getting married. I think Drea Wiseman's name was really Carla something, and she did that actor for a while, the guy who played the gigolo in New York? Then she had a kid by some French artist, I think. She was in exactly one movie, under a different name, too — Ramsey Rushmore. Not a porno, a real movie. It had one of those titles like Extreme Implant or Terminal Force. Ask me again tomorrow, sweetie, and I'll probably make more sense."

Brad located a sell-through copy of Forced Confession at the same Boulevard shop that had the old issue of Drea's magazine. It had been released direct-to-video in 1987. Drea was fifth-billed among a cast of nobodies, and the generic blurbage on the cassette sleeve promised no revelations. The director was Italian. Twelve minutes in, there she was, in lopsided EastmanColor pink with age. Fourteen minutes in, her top came off for the first time. The rest was more or less along those lines.

"I missed it when it premiered at the Chinese," said Philippe the next day, in the Raw Room. "My tux was at the cleaners."

"Whoa, I'm twisting in the backdraft of your acid wit," said Brad.

"Nice bags. Did Cherique know her?"

"Not usefully. Hey, where did these come from?" Brad snatched a new slide off the light-board and squinted at it against the ceiling lights.

"That's McCabe's latest goddess. I didn't catch a name."

"It's Drea. Look — she's a twin sister." Brad began sorting the other slides of McCabe's latest drop-off. "I'm not kidding; look."

Philippe shrugged. "Nice bags."

"It's her, Philippe. How old are these?"

"I can hear your heart beating faster. Are we infatuated today?"

"How old, Philippe, fucker?"

"These are the opposite of old. These are not Dream Girl. These were shot last Thursday. There's a little date on each one of them. Y'know, the kind of thing a professional would notice right away?"

"Do you want me to bring you a tampon for your mood; maybe you can jam it all the way into your ear?"

"No, because you're gonna want to take the slides, and you're gonna call McCabe, and I'm gonna have to finish this whole wretched layout by my lonesome, and stop me when I veer from the truth."

"You're a prince, Philippe."

"You're a queen, Brad."

Brad knew better than to fart around with McCabe's answering machine. He drove straight to the photographer's house, taking the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving the top down.

#

McCabe's Malibu eyrie was all flat white angles and too much glass; the sort of balconied showoff place onto which a realtor would tack half a million just for the view. The seaward windows usually got boarded up every time some new hurricane checked in from Hawaii; they were still covered with plywood in honor of El Niño as Brad stored his car in the elbow of a turnout that could park nine vehicles end-to-end. Most of McCabe's cars were home.

McCabe waved Brad to a sofa facing the ocean through a single un-boarded window and installed a drink in his grasp — a virtually uncut Scotch that nearly took Brad's breath away. He lent his own photos a two-second glance. " Sela Brownlee; so what? Did I fuck her? Sure."

"That's not what I wanted to talk about."

"That's all anybody ever wants to talk about, Brad-lad. Fucking and getting fucked. Who's doing it and who it's getting done to. When can you fuck, how long can you fuck, how soon can you brag about it. It is the basis of all power, all human desire, and most ambition. People groom themselves according to notions of fuckability. They edit their lives to make their personal stories fuckworthy. If you don't aspire to fuck someone, then you aspire to fuck them over and thus achieve a goal or desire which usually boils down to fucking someone else. We're pretty predictable, as a race. Cheers."

"I think this woman is Drea Wiseman."

One of McCabe's eyebrows arched. "Boy, there's a blast from the past. What were you, about two years old?"

"Older than that. Old enough." That struck Brad as peculiar, since he's always assumed he and McCabe were roughly the same vintage. Now, in the tricky light partially afforded by the board-up, McCabe definitely seemed older. Perhaps it was his gruff, paternal delivery. Or maybe it was the fact that McCabe hadn't had so much gray when Brad had last seen him several weeks ago.

" Drea Wiseman is old enough to draw Social Security, if she hasn't OD'ed by now, or blown her brains out, or been croaked by cancer or AIDS. Most of these chicks don't enjoy happy endings. Look at the pictures again. That's not Drea Wiseman with an expensive makeover and a good wig, posing for one of those stupid Sexy Moms Over Fifty spreads with the stretch marks airbrushed out. That's Sela, who wants to break into acting and be known by a single name only. She'll be a sensation until next Veteran's Day and then nobody will remember her except Cherique."

"You're blowing my fantasy, McCabe."

"Sorry. I've shot so many of these chicks with a camera that I think I want to start shooting them with a gun, maybe save them a little heartbreak. Then they get on their knees for you and take your dick in their hand, and their eyes get luminous and seem to fill the universe, and what do you know, I keep snapping away even though some days I feel like the Grim Reaper, collecting souls on proof sheets."

"You've got to look at this." Brad pulled the copy of Risqué from his briefcase. "I mean really look at it."

"Don't have to," said McCabe, recharging both their glasses. "I shot it. Two sessions, summer of '73, I can show you the proofs if you want. I'm the guy who suggested the clear polish on her nails."

Brad's heart gave a slam that seemed to bow his ribs. He almost blushed. Instead of lunging at the opportunity, however, he said, "What are you not telling me?"

McCabe looked directly into his eyes, holding his gaze for the first time since Brad had entered the room, then chuckled. "That's much better."

"I don't understand."

"You understand more than most. Come on."

Most of McCabe's career files were stored in seventy lateral filing cabinets stacked double along a corridor as long and wide as Death Row. They were labeled with adhesive numerals. Whatever treasures they contained remained unmolested. McCabe led Brad past every single one of them and into a room with a lot of slanted drafting tables, light-boards and broad, flat work surfaces. It reminded Brad of the Raw Room, if one could ever conceive of the Raw Room as uncluttered.

Stacks and stacks of Drea Wiseman awaited his inspection. Fully clothed, naked, daytime, by nightlight, by moon shimmer, in shadow, close-up, far away, demurely shy and spread out like lunchmeat on a cutting board. It was a feast and Brad was meant to gorge, and when he did he found that his brain could not hold enough of her. This was all static photographic evidence; it added Drea's existence up to a still picture. At least the Drea in Forced Confession had moved.

"And here's Sela Brownlee." McCabe portioned out a generous file of the new kid.

"What're those others?" McCabe riffled the label tabs. " Hm ... Nadia Dröeste, Brady Caverston, Milicent Rich, Leigh Micheline, Rexanna Schott, Corey Rose."

They were all Drea Wiseman. Different hair, different eye stylings, but all Drea. Brad paged through a mental timeline from 1979 to 1986, to 1992, to ... Sela Brownlee.

"Jesus H., McCabe," he whispered.

"Pretty weird, huh? So now that you're digesting this world-staggering information, what do you think you might do about it?"

"This is ..." Brad groped for adequate hyperbole. "Unprecedented. This is an article ... no, a book, at least ... this is ... McCabe, I've got to find her."

McCabe leaned against the doorjamb and exhaled heavily, rubbing his face. He looked, in that moment, like a very old man, decades distant from Brad's generation. "No chance you'd just kinda give this up and let me put away my files?"

"Are you nuts?"

"Nah, I can see the light in your eyes. You're not gonna let go of this."

"No way, masked man."

McCabe sipped his drink contemplatively. "I thought you might come to that." He extended a folded slip of his own letterhead paper, already written up. "Here's where you'll find her."

#

Further up PCH, practically to Point Pitt, as the sun gradually sinks into the horizon line of pre-storm chop, Brad imagines the thunderheads are steam produced by the extinguishing orb. It's in a big hurry to set, and the faster the road darkens, the faster Brad drives, making the night highball toward him. Salt accretes in damp white scales on his windshield. He is well past the posted limits as darkness takes over, too aware of forcing himself to rush toward the night, the storm, and the things he hopes he might find inside.

McCabe had scared him by handing over Drea Wiseman in a single folded page, even though her existence insofar as it concerned Brad, had begun with another single folded page. Brad had wanted secret files and dusty evidence, a process of excavation rewarded by discovery. Surely McCabe does not spew forth referrals to everyone who had ever been turned on by a centerfold. Brad feels stupidly like a guy viewing a Pointillist and seeing only big dots.

Nobody is laughing at him. Yet.

The address is a walled Spanish cliff-side retreat thoughtfully constructed to sluice off the assault of sea storms. No neighbors. Amber, insect-proof bulbs ring the wall and lend the compound a sodium glow against a night now insistent upon rain. The first drops speckle Brad and nest in his hair as he reads a framed, typed sheet telling him what to do with the intercom.

The iron gate buzzes and admits him to a courtyard. His hair is already soaked as he waits at the next door — three times as wide as he is, massy, struck crudely from wood. It resembles a drawbridge hinged on one side. The entry to a fortress. He suspects most of the house is hidden away in caverns snaking through the rock below him.

Too late now; he's drenched.

"You're Brad?"

No ... I mean, yes, I ...

She is already holding a folded green towel and she is looking at him the way a person might look at a citizen sprawled on the sidewalk before saying, Are you all right? She is wrapped up on some kind of leather-belted silky black top that swims around her when she moves; her slacks match and the whole ensemble is almost dressy. He expected her to be barefoot in her own home but she's wearing shoes like she expects to conduct business. She looks exactly like the Drea Wiseman in the 1974 centerfold except that now her hair is a deep, burnished mahogany and there is more of it, casually horse-tailed back. Brad's vision telescopes vertiginously and for a horrifying instant he is afraid he might faint dead away.

"It's you," he says.

"We'll see about that. McCabe called me." She leads him in and hands him the towel, indicating he should follow her, but they have not touched yet. Brad watches her walk. It is a low-slung stride, from the hips, easy and completely unmannered, a walk that unfolds her for his private adoration, a secret language of promises and availability that spears the meat of his heart.

"Mind you, McCabe wouldn't have called if the circumstances weren't special. Sit over there." She points at a chrome sculpture of a chair meshed with a kind of rubber webbing. Brad glances at the sofa. Of course not: he's wet as a fish. He dries his hair, grateful that he can hide behind the towel if only for a second. She brings him a tall glass of sparkling water and a flute of something that turns out to be a pretty refreshing Rhine, slightly spicy, not something that will render him sleepy or more idiotic. "No, drink the water first," she says. Brad does as he's told and is mildly shocked to find his body craves the water as though dehydrated; he drains the glass. "Now you can sip that," she says. "Okay ... so what makes you so special?"

"Are you Drea Wiseman?" She smiles to herself as though Brad has just asked whether she's female, or human. "Yes, now what makes you so special that McCabe would call me about you, and send you all the way up here in the rain?"

"I ... uh ..." Brad has no idea, so he says so.

Again the smile. "I like that. You don't lie if you don't know."  Already Brad is seduced, and he wonders if she is playing him out, feeding him the line that precedes the reeling in, and the devouring. He compels himself to stay level. "I'm not sure; I can tell you what I told McCabe."

"That'd be a good start." She settles in to listen. She can see Brad marveling at her all the way. This is nothing like a wet dream or a fantasy; Brad feels completely out of control, like he's suddenly naked on a city bus, and he comprehends why Chinese clichés warn people about wishing for things.

He unspools the story of the foldout, thankful he left the damned magazine in the car. He is not seeking an autograph and why would Drea need to see an obsolete magazine anyway?

"My name is Sela now," she corrects him, making him more a boob.

"Brownlee."

"Yes. Go ahead."

He is being given permission to display himself in an embarrassing way and suddenly he wonders about hidden cameras, recording devices, maybe in the potted ficus next to him. Then he wonders why he has not brought a camera, a tape recorder. And all the while his mouth wants to keep talking, about bad marriages, about fascination in the magical sense, about McCabe's astonishingly offhand confession ... all things that would make him look more sheepish than he already felt.

"How old are you?" she says with a conspiratorial smile. "Pushing what, 40?"

Brad makes a face.

"Already crossed that Rubicon; that's okay too. Kind of begs the next question, doesn't it?" Drea — Sela gets up, crosses the room, gets refills for both of them. They still have not touched. Brad has no idea of how much time has passed but it is still raining, in fact, water is bathtubbing down from the sky in harsh sheets. "I could tell you that I age well. I could tell you that I'm a different person, despite an amazing resemblance, and that you have been somehow tricked by the light, by romanticizing old photos, by projecting onto still pictures. But you still haven't told me what makes you special. Why you?"

Brad senses that he is failing some kind of quiz, and based on the assumption he might see this woman, this stranger, only this one time, he digs deeper and finds a confession. Now he wants to prattle about timelines from 1979 to 1986, 1992 to now, from Milicent Rich to Leigh Micheline, through Rexanna and then Corey, but realizes he knows nothing of these strangers. Instead, he tells Sela about his dad. He talks about glimpsing the face of Drea Wiseman while losing his virginity at a drive-in, and marrying Suzanne, and getting dumped by Jennifer Spikers, whose last name he now has no trouble remembering. He replays his intense conversation with McCabe, about how finding Drea Wiseman means articles and money and publicity, and maybe a book.

Sela reacts as though she has just received a mild electric shock on some pleasure center; things seem to align for her. "I've watched them try to expose Bettie Page, like boarding a bug under a magnifying light," she says. "It's disgusting. They printed those police photos of her when she was arrested. Those pictures damage what she meant to the people who loved her image. And when she's dead, full disclosure will help murder the mythology. I don't know about you, Brad, but I need to believe she'll always be that Bettie Page." She framed her hands, view-plating a picture in her mind. "You know what I mean?"

Brad says that he thinks so, lost. Her voice is giving him an erection he has to cross his legs, nonchalantly, to obscure.

"I know why you're special," she says. "You won't give up. Not ever. You'd be surprised how many obsessive people do. You feed them a bite of contrary evidence, you exploit their need to disbelieve the unbelievable, and they're satisfied. They give up and go away because they think they've found answers. Sometimes — rarely — people find it in themselves to countermand their default setting for rationalization; it's a double, she had a younger sister, it's someone made up to look like her, it can't really be her, why, she'd be a hag by now."

Blood pounds in Brad's temples. How is he supposed to conduct his life after he leaves this place? "But McCabe seems to know what's what."

"I have a deal with McCabe; he shoots my photographs. And I trust him, and soon I'll have to ask if I can trust you."

She has the power to make Brad's desire seem frivolous. He thinks — really thinks — for a moment, then says, "How?"

"I need you to tell me if everything is the same." She stands and loses the blouse and the light makes her the same color as in the magazine, so many years back. There are no tan lines and few dermal imperfections, and Brad is looking at her in a way that can only be described as respectful, even though she is removing her slacks and now stands less than four feet from her, naked except for the shoes, which have enough heel to mold her legs as she turns. "You'd know, you see. You'd recognize if anything was wrong or different, and you would tell me, yes?"

"Yes," he says, very softly, fighting not to lose his voice.

She beckons him up and kisses him. Their lips are the first flesh contact, which quickly spreads. His hands explore her as hers reconnoiter inside his clothing. In her mouth he can taste every lust he ever experienced, desires so familiar they are like necessary organs shielded by his bones.

"Can you help me?"

He regards her eyes, inhales her breath, and does not need to answer.

"Can you help me stay the way I am, the way you've always loved me? Can I trust you?"

"What can I do? What did McCabe do?"

"He gave me ten years of his life. I would ask for ten of yours, for this thing we are about to do." She points toward the ocean. "Out there, in the storm. I'll take you out there. And I would ask for ten years."

Brad has already spent close to 30 years, he realizes, in transit toward this room and this moment. He is willing to eagerly agree to this bizarre proposition, and not solely for glandular reasons; he not only wants this woman, who is named Sela, tonight, but he needs her to actually move in and occupy one of the spaces of his life, exactly tonight, during this raging storm.

"Please say yes, and help me," she says. She removes her shoes and opens a big sliding glass door. The rain sizzles on the terrace and a vigorous breeze snaps burgundy curtains inward. It is not cold, merely wet and alive.

When they are naked on the sand, they too are wet and alive and anything but cold. Their connection is magnetic and unyielding, more akin to the elemental forces prompting the storm than to any mere collision of flesh, of lengths, depths and widths. Every one of Brad's pores seems gently threaded to those of Sela's; when she moves, he feels the tug all over his skin. When he comes the first time he swears he can feel his own semen being ducted out of him as though pulled by a strong alien gravity. Sela has but to shift a minute degree, and meet his gaze with eyes that shine violet in the storm-glow, and he becomes erect inside of her again — that is all it takes. He would not peak with a mere orgasm and be deprived of the warm embrace into which he is so blissfully sunk. He feels her climax, like a powerful fist closing, cradling him with deliberate gentleness and the tease that such control might be quickly and unexpectedly overridden. Most feelings of security held the danger of becoming suffocating traps, like quicksand. But for those who could ride this treacherous tide, the raw current gushing through Brad's body came as close to defining genuine ecstasy as any thought or sensation it had ever been his conceit to experience.

They outlasted the storm.

#

Hours, still, before sunup. They started a blaze inside a capacious flagstone fireplace, and tended each other's needs.

"Ever since I was old enough to have sex," said Brad, "it was never a question of who I wanted to fuck, but who would agree to fuck me. I thought I had to pursue women. A teenage boy is just an enormous gland and like most teenage boys it never occurred to me that girls had sexual cravings."

"Excepting sluts, of course," Sela said, amused by watching him talk half to the fire, half to her.

"The first time I aspired to a girl — a woman — who, as it turned out, wanted me right back, I figured it must be love."

"Reciprocity is a bitch. She wanted you, so you concluded this was the love you'd heard so much about ... and it turned out that the emotions were different for her, I bet."

"Yeah — she just basically wanted to get laid, and didn't want to be called a slut. If I had a virtue before I was twenty, it was discretion, mostly because I was terrified of revealing anything to anybody. She had already been through so much more than me and had just hit that phase where she needed to vary the menu, because she was afraid of closing doors too early on relationships that were different than the ones she knew how to control."

"And her name was ... ?"

"I remember it alright, the way you're supposed to remember the name of the person who relieved you of the curse of virginity. That's one myth that's true. But I'm going to keep it to myself, okay?"

"That's kind of charming," Sela said. "That privacy thing is hardwired into you, isn't it? Now I'll have to wonder if you're lying, and can't remember her name, or if you're telling the truth."

"I'm telling the truth."

"It's that discretion thing, right?" She saw his expression and smiled. "Relax. I already have what I want from you and I'm enjoying this part, too." She watched until she was sure he hadn't been wounded. "What became of her, that long-ago love?"

"Married a guy who impregnated her and beat her up a lot. They knew her as well in the E.R. as they did in maternity ward."

"And you lost track of her, once she'd made that wrong choice?"

"Don't misunderstand me; I wasn't exactly gloating. The memories that stayed with me were of her, before all that. She knew how to say amazingly appropriate things; things that had me thinking them over hours later. They amazed me, anyway ..."

"You matured."

"I saw her face in passing strangers for a long time after that. But that part is a fantasy. It never would have worked out for us, together. It was my idealization ... just like my idealization of you, in the centerfold."

"Well congratulations Brad, because you've just matured again."

"By exactly ten years according to you. And there's no trick to it?"

She frowned. "Trick?"

"Yeah. A twist ending. The little unrevealed detail that traps me into a devil's deal, you know — like, I age ten years, but they're dog years, so I actually become seventy years older in the blink of a lash."

Sela chuckled at that one. It was throaty, full-bodied; to Brad the sound percolated with honesty. "No. Nothing like that."

He examined his face in an ornate mirror next to an iron coat rack where most of his humid clothing still hung. "Looks the same. I've never had a smooth complexion."

"You'll notice little differences, but you can afford most of the hit. You can subtract ten years from most normal people and they'll never notice. Isn't that what some careers do, or parenthood? One day you look in the mirror and realize a big chunk of your life sneaked away. It happens to most everybody."

"Except you." Brad flashed on the centerfold again; the way her eyes had changed from brown to violet in the middle of the thunderstorm.

"That's because of you. You made me immortal in one way, in your mind; since you came this far I decided to let you help me stay as I am in a slightly more practical way."

"What about McCabe? He said he ... that is, that you and he ..." Brad thought suddenly and uncomfortably how much older McCabe had looked tonight, compared to the last time they'd met.

"He probably said it to bait you, but I made an arrangement with McCabe a long, long time ago."

"He's your official photographer. Your only photographer."

"It's more than that. He had an ache inside he had to evacuate, a lot like you. I needed ten years bad enough that the lack of them forced me to become a recluse for a while. There wasn't anybody like you around then Brad. And McCabe was messed up over some model he'd fallen in love with and fucked up somehow. He gave me the years I needed and I leeched the pain out of him."

"And you trust him."

"Yes."

"What did you do with it, the pain?"

"It was a pain I could handle. Assimilate. I needed the years more. Now time has done part of my work, and people like you come looking. Not many, but enough. Fewer still are willing to come this far and indulge me. Now, please let me kiss you goodnight. Get out of here before the day starts."

She had softly liberated some heart-meat pain from him as well. Brad could feel a buoyancy inside his chest despite her calm announcement that it was time for him to go. She had been kind to him in a way that should not be spoiled by words spoken aloud; that would be as inappropriate as snapping a Polaroid and asking her for an autograph on his way out the big door.

So she kissed him, and she meant it, and the door closed behind him and it was over. Back in the car, southbound, he frequently glanced at the magazine there on the seat next to him, but he never opened it to look at the pictures, not once.

He had told her about those he had met, married and mated, women who had left neither residual flavor nor pang of regret, who had walked out of his life one after another, leaving that life as ordered as Suzanne's long-ago closet. There were no crippling lows from which he could not recover because there had been no equivalent highs of passion, save one.

It would be easy to drive back to the city, to have a quick drink with Philippe and graze Cherique's cheek with a kiss, maybe drop a card in the mail to his ex-wife. None of this would matter because his friends had had no more impact on his life than his lovers; the people of his existence mattered as little as outmoded fashions in a thrift store. He wanted them to mean more but each of them failed to portray the character parts imposed upon them. Save one.

His personal affairs were so neat they could be wrapped in a single business day — the kind you marked off with an "X" — but what was the point?

Brad slowed his car into a wide U-turn on the coast highway. It was still early enough that no traffic existed to stop him. Then he headed north to spend the rest of his years and no one ever saw him again.