"Too many birds coming home to roost."

"But you're staying?"

"I vacillate. England's so pleasant in the spring. And I'd miss the cricket in the summer months."

"They play cricket everywhere, don't they?"

"Not in Yzordderrex they don't."

"You'd go there forever?"

"Why not? n.o.body would find me, because n.o.body would ever guess where I'd gone."

"I'd know."

"Then maybe I'd have to take you with me," he said tentatively, almost as though he were making the proposal in all seriousness and was afraid of being refused. "Could you bear that thought?" he said. "Of leaving the Fifth, I mean."

"I could bear it."

He paused. Then: "I think it's about time I showed you some of my treasures," he said, rising from his chair. "Come on."

She'd known from oblique remarks of Dowd's that the locked room on the second floor contained some kind of collection, but its nature, when he finally unlocked the door and ushered her in, astonished her.

"All this was collected in the Dominions," Oscar explained, "and brought back by hand."

He escorted her around the room, giving her a capsule summary of what some of the stranger objects were and bringing from hiding tiny items she might otherwise have overlooked. Into the former category, among others, went the Boston Bowl and Gaud Maybellome's Encyclopedia of Heavenly Signs Encyclopedia of Heavenly Signs; into the latter a bracelet of beetles caught by the killing jar in their daisy chain coupling-fourteen generations, he explained, male entering female, and female in turn devouring the male in front, the circle joined by the youngest female and the oldest male, who, by dint of the latter's suicidal acrobatics, were face to face.

She had many questions, of course, and he was pleased to play the teacher. But there were several inquiries he had no answers to. Like the empire looters from whom he was descended, he'd a.s.sembled the collection with commitment, taste, and ignorance in equal measure. Yet when he spoke of the artifacts, even those whose function he had no clue to, there was a touching fervor in his tone, familiar as he was with the tiniest detail of the tiniest piece.

"You gave some objects to Charlie, didn't you?" she said.

"Once in a while. Did you see them?"

"Yes, indeed," she said, the brandy tempting her tongue to confess the dream of the blue eye, her brain resisting it.

"If things had been different," Oscar said, "Charlie might have been the one wandering the Dominions. I owe him a glimpse."

" 'A piece of the miracle,'" she quoted.

"That's right. But I'm sure he felt ambivalent about them."

"That was Charlie."

"True, true. He was too English for his own good. He never had the courage of his feelings, except where you were concerned. And who could blame him?"

She looked up from the trinket she was studying to find that she too was a subject of study, the look on his face unequivocal.

"It's a family problem," he said. "When it comes to... matters of the heart."

This confession made, a look of discomfort crossed his face, and his hand went to his ribs. "I'll leave you to look around if you like," he said. "There's nothing in here that's really volatile."

"Thank you."

"Will you lock up after yourself?"

"Of course."

She watched him go, unable to think of anything to detain him, but feeling forsaken once he'd gone. She heard him go to his bedroom, which was down the hall on the same floor, and close the door behind him. Then she turned her attention back to the treasures on the shelves. It wouldn't stay there, however. She wanted to touch, and be touched by, something warmer than these relics. After a few moments of hesitation she left them in the dark, locking the door behind her. She would take the key back to him, she'd decided. If his words of admiration were not simply flattery-if he had bed on his mind-she'd know it soon enough. And if he rejected her, at least there'd be an end to this trial by doubt.

She knocked on the bedroom door. There was no reply. There was light seeping from under the door, however, so she knocked again and then turned the handle and, saying his name softly, entered. The lamp beside the bed was burning, illuminating an ancestral portrait that hung over it. Through its gilded window a severe and sallow individual gazed down on the empty sheets. Hearing the sound of running water from the adjacent bathroom, Jude crossed the bedroom, taking in a dozen details of this, his most private chamber, as she did so: the plushness of the pillows and the linen; the spirit decanter and gla.s.s beside the bed; the cigarettes and ashtray on a small heap of well-thumbed paperbacks. Without declaring herself, she pushed the door open. Oscar was sitting on the edge of the bath in his undershorts, dabbing a washcloth to a partially healed wound in his side. Reddened water ran over the furry swell of his belly. Hearing her, he looked up. There was pain on his face.

She didn't attempt to offer an excuse for being there, nor did he request one. He simply said, "Charlie did it."

"You should see a doctor."

"I don't trust doctors. Besides, it's getting better." He tossed the washcloth into the sink. "Do you make a habit of walking into bathrooms unannounced?" he said. "You could have walked in on something even less-"

"Venereal?" she said.

"Don't mock me," he replied. "I'm a crude seducer, I know. It comes from years of buying company."

"Would you be more comfortable buying me?" she said.

"My G.o.d," he replied, his look appalled. "What do you take me for?"

"A lover," she said plainly. "My lover?" lover?"

"I wonder if you know what you're saying?"

"What I don't know I'll learn," she said. "I've been hiding from myself, Oscar. Putting everything out of my head so I wouldn't feel anything. But I feel a lot. And I want you to know that."

"I know," he said. "More than you can understand, I know. And it makes me afraid, Judith."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," she said, astonished that it was she who was mouthing these words of rea.s.surance when he was the elder and presumably the stronger, the wiser. She reached out and put her palm flat against his ma.s.sive chest. He bent forward to kiss her, his mouth closed until he met hers and found it open. One hand went around her back, the other to her breast, her murmur of pleasure smeared between their mouths. His touch moved down, over her stomach, past her groin, to hoist up her skirt and retrace its steps. His fingers found her sopping-she'd been wet since first stepping into the treasure room-and he slid his whole hand down into the hot pouch of her underwear, pressing the heel of his palm against the top of her s.e.x while his long middle digit sought out her fundament, gently catching its flukes with his nail.

"Bed," she said.

He didn't let her go. They made an ungainly exit from the bathroom, with him guiding her backwards until she felt the edge of the bed behind her thighs. There she sat down, taking hold of the waistband of his blood-stained shorts and easing them down while she kissed his belly. Suddenly bashful, he reached to stop her, but she pulled them down until his p.e.n.i.s appeared. It was a curiosity. Only a little engorged, it had been deprived of its foreskin, which made its outlandishly bulbous, carmine head look even more inflamed than the wound in its wielder's side. The stem was very considerably thinner and paler, its length knotted with veins bearing blood to its crown. If it was this disproportion that embarra.s.sed him he had no need, and to prove her pleasure she put her lips against the head. His objecting hand was no longer in evidence. She heard him make a little moan above, and looked up to see him staring down at her with something very like awe on his face. Sliding her fingers beneath t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and stem, she raised the curiosity to her mouth and took it inside; then she dropped both hands to her blouse and began to unb.u.t.ton. But he'd no sooner started to harden in her mouth than he murmured a denial, withdrew his member, and stepped back from her, pulling up his underwear.

"Why are you doing this?" he said.

"I'm enjoying it."

He was genuinely agitated, she saw, shaking his head, covering the bulge in his underwear in a new fit of bashfulness.

"For whose sake?" he said. "You don't have to, you know."

"I know."

"I wonder?" he said, genuine puzzlement in his voice.

"I don't want to use you."

"I wouldn't let you."

"Maybe you wouldn't know."

This remark inflamed her. A rage rose such as she'd not felt in a long while. She stood up.

"I know what I want," she said, "but I'm not about to beg for it."

"That's not what I'm saying."

"What are are you saying?" you saying?"

"That I want you too."

"So do something about it," she said.

He seemed to find her fury freshly arousing and stepped towards her again, saying her name in a voice almost pained with feeling. "I'd like to undress you," he said. "Would you mind?"

"No."

"I don't want you to do anything-"

"Then I won't."

"-except lie down."

She did so. He turned off the bathroom light, then came to the edge of the bed and looked down at her. His bulk was emphasized by the light from the lamp, which threw his shadow up to the ceiling. Quant.i.ty had never seemed an arousing quality hitherto, but in him she found it intensely attractive, evidence as it was of his excesses and his appet.i.tes. Here was a man who would not be contained by one world, one set of experiences, but who was kneeling now like a slave in front of her, his expression that of one obsessed.

With consummate tenderness, he began to undress her. She'd known fetishists before-men to whom she was not an individual but a hook upon which some particular item was hung for worship. If there was any such particular in this man's head, it was the body he now began to uncover, proceeding to do so in an order and manner that made some fevered sense to him. First he slipped off her underpants; then he finished unb.u.t.toning her blouse, without removing it. Next he teased her b.r.e.a.s.t.s from her bra, so that they were available to his toying, but then didn't play there but went to her shoes, removing them and setting them beside the bed before hoisting up her skirt so as to have a view of her s.e.x. Here his eyes lingered, his fingers advancing up her thigh to the crease of her groin, then retreating. Not once did he look at her face. She looked at his, however, enjoying the zeal and veneration there. Finally he rewarded his own diligence with kisses. First on her lower legs, moving up towards her knees; then her stomach and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and finally returning to her thighs and up into the place he'd forbidden them both till now. She was ready for pleasure, and he supplied it, his huge hand caressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as he tongued her. She closed her eyes as he unfolded her, alive to every drop of moisture on her l.a.b.i.a and legs. When he rose from this to finish undressing her-skirt first, then blouse and bra-her face was hot and her breath fast. He tossed the clothes onto the floor and stood up again, taking her knees and pushing them up and back, spreading her for his delectation, and holding her there, prettily exposed.

"Finger yourself," he said, not letting her go.

She put her hands between her legs and made a show for him. He'd slickened her well, but her fingers went deeper than his tongue, readying herself for the curiosity. He gorged on the sight, meanwhile, glancing up to her face several times, then returning to the spectacle below. All trace of his previous hesitation had gone. He encouraged her with his admiration, calling her a host of sweet names, his tented underwear proof-as if she needed it-of his arousal. She started to push her hips up from the bed to meet her fingers, and he took firmer grip of her knees as she moved, opening her wider still. Lifting his right hand to his mouth he licked his middle finger and put it down against her pucker of her other hole, rubbing it gently.

"Will you suck me now?" he asked her. "Just a little?"

"Show me it," she said.

He stepped away from her and took off his underwear. The curiosity was now fully risen and florid. She sat up and put it back between her lips, one hand holding it by its pulsing root while the other continued its dalliance with her own s.e.x. She'd never been good at guessing the point at which the milk boiled over, so she took it from the heat of her mouth to cool him a little, glancing up at him as she did so. Either the extraction or her glance set him off, however.

"d.a.m.n!" he said. "d.a.m.n!", and started to step back from her, his hand going down to his groin to take the curiosity in a stranglehold.

It seemed he might have succeeded, as two desultory dribbles ran from its head. Then his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es unleashed their flood, and it came forth in uncommon abundance. He moaned as it came, as much in self-admonishment as pleasure, she thought, that a.s.sumption confirmed when he'd emptied his sac upon the floor.

"I'm sorry..." he said, "... I'm sorry..."

"There's no need," she said, standing up and putting her lips to his. He continued to murmur his apologies, however.

"I haven't done that in a long time," he said. "So adolescent."

She kept her silence, knowing anything she said would only begin a further round of self-reproach. He slipped away into the bathroom to find a towel. When he returned she was picking up her clothes.

"Are you going?" he said.

"Only to my room."

"Do you have to?" he said. "I know that wasn't much of a performance, but... the bed's big enough for us both. And I don't snore."

"The bed's enormous."

"So... would you stay?" he said.

"I'd like to."

He made a charming smile. "I'm honored," he said. "Will you excuse me a moment?"

He switched the bathroom light back on and disappeared inside, closing the door, leaving her to lie back on the bed and wonder at this whole turn of events. Its very oddness seemed appropriate. After all, this whole journey had begun with an act of misplaced love: love become murder. Now a new dislocation. Here she was, lying in the bed of a man with a body far from beautiful, whose bulk she longed to have upon her; whose hands were capable of fratricide but aroused her like none she'd ever known; who'd walked more worlds than an opium poet, but couldn't speak love without stumbling; who was a t.i.tan, and yet, afraid. She made a nest among his duck-down pillows and waited there for him to come back and tell her a story of love.

He reappeared after a long while and slipped beneath the sheets beside her. True to her imaginings, he said he loved her at last, but only once he'd turned the light out, and his eyes were not available for study.

When she slept, it was deeply, and when she woke again, it was like sleeping, dark and pleasurable, the former because the drapes were still drawn, and between their cracks she could see that the sky was still benighted, the latter because Oscar was behind her, and inside. One of his hands was upon her breast, the other lifting her leg so that he could ease his upward stroke. He'd entered her with skill and discretion, she realized. Not only had he not stirred her until he was embedded, but he'd chosen the virgin pa.s.sage, which-had he suggested it while she was awake-she'd have attempted to coax him from, fearing the discomfort. In truth, there was none, though the sensation was quite unlike anything she'd felt before. He kissed her neck and shoulder blade, light kisses, as though he was unaware of her wakefulness. She made it known with a sigh. His stroke slowed and stopped, but she pressed her b.u.t.tocks back to meet his thrust, satisfying his curiosity as to the limit of its access, which was to say none. She was happy to accept him entirely, trapping his hand against her breast to press it to rougher service, while putting her own at the connecting place. He'd dutifully slipped on a condom before entering her, which, together with the fact that he'd already poured forth once tonight, made him a near perfect lover: slow and certain.

She didn't use the dark to reconfigure him. The man pressing his face into her hair, and biting at her shoulder, wasn't-like the mystif he'd described-a reflection of imagined ideals. It was Oscar G.o.dolphin, paunch, curiosity, and all. What she did did reconfigure was herself, so that she became in her mind's eye a glyph of sensation: a line dividing from the coil of her pierced core, up through her belly to the points of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then intersecting again at her nape, crossing and becoming woven spirals beneath the hood of her skull. Her imagination added a further refinement, inscribing a circle around this figure, which burned in the darkness behind her lips like a vision. Her rapture was perfected then: being an abstraction in his arms, yet pleasured like flesh. There was no greater luxury. reconfigure was herself, so that she became in her mind's eye a glyph of sensation: a line dividing from the coil of her pierced core, up through her belly to the points of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then intersecting again at her nape, crossing and becoming woven spirals beneath the hood of her skull. Her imagination added a further refinement, inscribing a circle around this figure, which burned in the darkness behind her lips like a vision. Her rapture was perfected then: being an abstraction in his arms, yet pleasured like flesh. There was no greater luxury.

He asked if they might move, saying only, "The wound..." by way of explanation.

She went onto her hands and knees, he slipping from her for a tormenting moment while she did so, then putting the curiosity back to work. His rhythm instantly became more urgent, his fingers in her s.e.x, his voice in her head, both expressing ecstasy. The glyph brightened in her mind's eye, fiery from end to end. She yelled out to him, first only yes yes and and yes yes, then plainer demands, inflaming him to new invention. The glyph became blinding, burning away all thought of where she was, or what; all memory of conjunctions past subsumed in this perpetuity.

She was not even aware that he'd spent himself until she felt him withdrawing, and then she reached behind her to keep him inside a while longer. He obliged. She enjoyed the sensation of his softening inside her, and even, finally, his exiting, the tender muscle yielding its prisoner reluctantly. Then he rolled over onto the bed beside her and reached for the light. It was dim enough not to sting, but still too bright, and she was about to protest when she saw that he was putting his fingers to his injured side. Their congress had unknitted the wound. Blood was running from it in two directions: down towards the curiosity, still nestled in the condom, and down his side to the sheet.

"It's all right," he said as she made to get up. "It looks worse than it is."

"It still needs something to staunch it," she said.

"That's good G.o.dolphin blood," he said, wincing and grinning at the same moment. His gaze went from her face to the portrait above the bed. "It's always flowed freely," he said.

"He doesn't look as though he approved of us," she said.

"On the contrary," Oscar replied. "I know for a fact he'd adore you. Joshua understood devotion."

She looked at the wound again. Blood was seeping between his fingers.

"Won't you let me cover that up?" she said. "It makes me queasy."

"For you... anything."