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We did it twelve times — made love, all of us, to one another twelve times, the two of them doing everything two people could do to me twelve times. I was going to say only twelve times, but it wasn't "only," was it? It was wonderful.
    I began, last night, at the beginning. The rule was I had to tell the truth, and I had to tell him everything. I could start where I liked. I told him the story every night; he asked for it, for some version of it, every night. Sometimes I left out a detail so he would prompt me, and thus participate after a fashion. "The inevitability of orgasm?" he might say, and I would say "The way she moved her hip into me first."
    Sometimes I changed their names. Names were not the details that mattered to him. What mattered was the most refined particularity of our actions, and the declarative nature of my narrative. He did not want me to use language that said

anything other than what it was. For me, I mean. Well, for them, her. All of us.
    "I want you to give me points on the body — nuanced, subtilized, exact," he said.
    "I want fine-grained diction in the reportage, and I want it to be plummy. I want the ring of inexpressible reality — yet lyric."
    "Were there photographs?" he asked, knowing that there were.
    "Tell me," he said he wanted to know, "who took the pictures of you?"
    Sometimes I tried to tell a different story. But he liked best when I told him about the man and the woman together — together with me. I learned that the more froideur in my tone, the more heated, the more insistent he would become — until I would be unable to continue because his mouth would be stopped up.


"Don't let the game warden see you," said the man painting the dock. "Indians the only ones allowed to net fish."
    The net I was sweeping through the shallow part of the lake was a child's butterfly net I had found in the sand. The dock painter who warned

me against the game warden was the same dock painter who had told me that a black racer was a water moccasin. I didn't tell him I knew he was wrong, but let him think I was rash for reaching in after it.
    People on the lake were ready with the rules, rebuked the fantasy daily. The vision had been: Swim with the dog, shoulder-to-shoulder, every morning, to the other side. But a hand-stenciled sign was posted when the season started: NO DOGS ON BATHING BEACH, though dogs were not the nonreaders leaving Band-Aids and cigarettes in the water.
    The seven hundred dollars I had paid in dues covered plowing snow, but I would not be getting the benefit of winter. I had moved here for the lake, and then would not go in the lake; I'd be gone before leaves began to fall.
    The former tenant said she had recovered here. From what, she did not say, but she said she had given herself five years to do it in. Well, was there anybody who wasn't here to get over something, too?
    His letter was forwarded to me here.
    "I believe I need another look at someone who writes such a charming letter," he said.
    I had written to him after our meeting two years before. I had told him everything in that letter as though he had asked for me to. I had written him the whole time I was away, a woman he had met just once. And then he wrote me back. He invited me to see his new work. He had a show opening soon, he said, and the paintings were not, he said, anything like what he had done before.
    He said he liked the way I described the place where I had been, where the small group of us lived, and got better. He said he liked the sound of the beach where we went when we were given a pass. He said he had tried to paint such a place, and maybe I would like to see it.