"They aren't expecting me till...later," I said, face beginning to burn like fire. "I can be home by midnight."

In truth, I did not think they were expecting me at all. I had not talked to my mother in weeks. She probably did not even know the date of school's closing. Before I had always called and told her when I was coming home; this time I had not. I did not want to examine my reasons for that.

"Sure?"

"Yes."

"Let's go, then," he said, and switched off his desk lamp and followed me out of the dark lab. He did not touch me, but I could feel his presence behind me as palpably as if he had both hands on my shoulders. He was so close that I could feel his breath on my hair.

I think La Strada is my favorite movie of all time; I had seen it twice then, and I try to see it whenever there is a revival in Manhattan. But that night I sat in the darkened, near-empty theater next to Paul Sibley and saw almost nothing but flickering idiot images. He did not talk to me, or even move often; he seemed totally absorbed in the drama unfolding on the screen. But his physical presence consumed me. My flesh seemed to pull toward him of its own accord; my head inclined toward the dark bulk of his shoulder; my very blood seemed to flow toward him. Every atom in my body whirled toward the answering atoms in his flesh; I became aware, about the middle of the movie, that I was breathing in unison with him.

Toward the end of the movie he took my hand. Fire seemed to leap from his fingers to mine. I would not have been surprised to see a spark arc through the darkness, as from the end of God's finger to Moses' on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. All sensation left my body and flew to dwell in the hand that his held. For the rest of the movie I sat breathing lightly and quietly, my hand in his as hot and heavy as if it had been fresh cast of lead...seeing nothing, hearing nothing.

When it ended and the house lights came up, he dropped my hand and we walked silently out of the movie house and into the fragrant, mothy dark of late May. Honeysuckle poured its scent like a river from the banks of privet hedge behind the parking lot, and over that the light, heart-shaking smell of mimosa swam from somewhere near. Katydids called off in the thick, warm darkness. Otherwise there was little noise. The campus seemed suspended at the bottom of a dark, still sea. We reached the MG before he spoke.

"That's the saddest movie I ever saw in my life," he said quietly, and I looked up and saw the silver tracks of tears on his dark face. I thought of the movie: loss and poignancy, innocence shattered and dead, remorse and heartbreak on the shores of a dark ocean. I thought of his dead young wife. I did not think I could bear, for him, whatever brought the tears to those dark Indian eyes.

I reached up with both hands and took his face in them, and kissed him. It was, in the beginning, a soft kiss, but it turned to fire and thunder under my mouth, pure, tearing need. I was totally without wits or breath when he finally let me go. We looked at each other silently, and then he said, softly, "Oh, shit. Let's go."

"Where?" I whispered. I hadn't enough breath for anything else.

"To my place. I'm going to cook dinner for you. You can call your folks from there."

"Okay," I said. But I knew that I would not.

I fished the car keys out of my purse and handed them to him. My hands were trembling; I knew I would drive badly.

"Would you mind driving?" I said. "I don't know where you live."

In the darkness he laughed softly.

"Yes, you do," he said. "I've seen your car go by about a million times. I thought you were looking to buy the place."

"It's a shortcut to Dairyland," I muttered.

"One thing you don't ever have to do with me, Kate, is lie," Paul said. "I'm not going to lie to you and I don't want you to do it to me. You don't need to. God, what a grand little car. I haven't driven anything like it since France. I had a wonderful old Citroen touring car, about a thousand years old. We...I drove it all over Europe before it finally died on me, in Grenoble."

I thought of him in the big car, top down, the black hair blowing in the high, pure sunlight of the French Alps, laughing down at a dark, vivid girl beside him. Somehow I could see her plain: small, sharp-featured, doe-eyed, graceful as a new fawn. It was only later that I realized the ghost wife in the car beside Paul was Audrey Hepburn. Cecie and I had both agreed that she was the one woman in the world we'd most like to resemble. I said nothing on the drive over to Scofield Street. Audrey sat in the space between Paul and me.

Paul cut the motor of the MG when we reached the driveway and coasted down it to the backyard, where the forlorn little two-story garage peered out of its thicket of kudzu and honeysuckle.

"We'll have to be quiet," he said. "My landlady has suffered keenly all summer because she hasn't been able to catch me with a woman back here. Once we're in, it's okay, though. She's used to lights and music at all hours."

"I'm signed out for home, anyway," I said, and then wished I could have bitten out my tongue. Now he would think I had planned this night, even if he had not before.

He laughed again, and opened the door for me very quietly, and motioned for me to go ahead of him up the perilous-looking wooden stairs. The night around us was very black, and the smell from the honeysuckle thicket was overpowering; it was like breathing wine or honey.

"I can feel you blushing in the dark," he said. "You put out heat."

"I'm really not accustomed to going home with boys late at night," I whispered, wishing someone, something, would stop my idiot mouth. He was light years, millenniums, away from being a boy.

He stopped on the little porch and turned me to face him. I could see only his outline, and the gleam of his eyes in the warm dark.

"When I said I was going to cook dinner for you, I meant just that," he said gently. "I'm not going to seduce you. I'm not going to put the make on you. Later, almost certainly, but not until you're ready for it. My self-control is legendary. You're going to have to ask."

The sucking, shimmering apprehension died in my chest, but under it flickered a feeling that I recognized as loss.

"What if I don't?" I said.

He pushed the hair off my forehead very gently, and smiled. His teeth flashed white in the dark.

"You already have," he said.

I said nothing. We stood silent as he fumbled for his key.

"It ain't much, but it's home," he said, and ushered me into his apartment and closed the door. I stood still as he went around pulling shades. Then the room bloomed into light, and I gasped in surprise and delight.

The little room was exquisite, as compact and jeweled as a pomegranate, as exotic as a miniature seraglio. At first glance it was overwhelming; pure, deep colors flashed and swam in patterns like a kaleidoscope, and fabric and texture shimmered so richly that I could not take it in. I simply stood and stared. It was a small room, low-ceilinged and beamed, and he had stuccoed the walls and painted everything structural...walls, beams, ceiling...a pure and shadowless white. But floors and walls and furniture teemed with color.

The floor was completely covered with as magnificent an Oriental rug as I had ever seen, even in the homes of my friends from Randolph Macon and Cape Cod. Its stained-glass colors actually pulsed in the light: deep crimson, azure blue, jewel green, cream, and gold. There was a daybed covered with another rug in softer colors, those of the desert; a tall Gothic armchair of black wood, covered in lovely, faded old green damask. A magnificent black leather Eames chair and ottoman sat beneath one of the room's two windows, with a rough white wool robe thrown over it. Beneath the other window, a white built-in desk and shelves held books and models and pottery in the same jewel tones as the rug, and a table board and drafting lamp. Enormous patterned pillows littered the floors, and the white walls burned with prints and paintings with the stark, sun-smitten look of Italy, Mexico, and Spain about them. The windows were covered only with pleated white parchment-paper blinds, and hanging white pleated paper lamps provided the only other illumination besides the drafting lamp. But the room was not dark. It seemed to swim in pure, concentrated light and color. At the far end, a massive painted screen depicting a medieval hunting scene half hid a rudimentary kitchen. I saw bits of an ancient gas stove, a sink, an oilclothcovered table on which sat a laboring pint-sized refrigerator, and a lone shelf that held plates and cups and a great, trailing fern. Other plants rioted in the room from ceiling brackets, tables, the bookcase, the desk; a growing tree of some sort dominated one corner, behind the Eames chair. I did not see a separate sleeping alcove. I supposed that he slept on the daybed. A great, dark armoire, by far the largest piece in the room, undoubtedly housed his clothing. It, too, looked Mediterranean, and very old.

He turned to me, smiling, and I said, "It's absolutely beautiful. I never saw anything like it. It's like finding a Faberge egg in a garbage can..." and then I stopped, and reddened again. I could scarcely have found a more insulting analogy.

But he laughed.

"I may not have a pot to piss in, but I refuse to live like an animal or a fraternity boy," he said. "I'm glad you like it. I do, too. This stuff needs a room at least twice this size, but I could barely afford this dump, and I'm sure not going to store it or give it away. Not after dragging it all over Europe and the southern United States."

"Oh," I said. Of course; this was the furniture of his marriage, his and the French girl's; I kept forgetting that he had had another life, another context entirely, than that of impoverished student. His sophistication was real, acquired by living his way into it. I thought, bleakly, that I could not hold a candle to the cultivated ghost who had chosen these beautiful things, lived among them with him.

"Did you buy it all abroad?" I said, as much to break the silence as from a desire to know.

"No. I was as poor there as I am here. I can't remember a time I wasn't in school of some kind, except the Army. All this stuff was my wife's. Her family's, that is. They had money. I should have given it back to them when she...died, but by that time they hated my ass and I theirs, and it gave me no end of pleasure to abscond, as M. Foucald put it, with this stuff. It was wasted on them, anyway. They didn't pick it out; some designer did. It came from their place in Marrakesh."

The fabled name swam in the air between us.

"It must be a great comfort to you, to have these things to remember her by," I said. It sounded like a line out of a bad movie. Even Deborah Kerr couldn't have done it well.

He laughed again, wearily.

"It's a great comfort to have these things, period," he said. "She didn't like me a damn bit better than her family by that time; she had already filed for divorce when we had the accident. I'm sorry she's dead, but I'm not a bit sorry she isn't in my life anymore. We were both stupidly young when we married; I was a skinny, arrogant kid and she was a fat, spoiled one. By the time we'd grown up another year it was apparent to everybody that it was a marriage made in hell. I consider these things payment in full for some very bad years. She was just as impossible to live with as I was."

Again, I could think of nothing to say. We were quiet for another space of time.

"I just don't want there to be any false sentiment between us," he said presently. "It was a bad marriage. She wanted a husband to take care of her and show off in Orleans, and her family wanted the same thing, and about that time I discovered Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and decided to be an architect, and it all went to hell about then. She never would have come to America, and McKim made it plain I had to come back if I wanted the job. They won't hire foreign-educated architects. But it would have unraveled sooner or later, anyway. Berthe was about as unlike Leslie Caron as anybody you ever saw."

I put my face into my hands and shook my head. Helpless laughter bubbled through my fingers. My heart soared.

"I was thinking Audrey Hepburn," I whispered.

"Not on her best day." He laughed, too. "And the worst thing was, she never cooked a meal the entire time we were married. At least I can thank her for being probably the best cook you've met in your young life. Wait until you taste my cuisine francaise."

He disappeared behind the carved screen and I heard the creak of an oven door. A rich, deep, winy smell curled out and into my nostrils, and I felt saliva start. It was past nine, and I had not eaten since lunch at Dairyland with Cecie. That seemed, as Hemingway said, long ago and in another country.

"That smells heavenly," I said, looking into the wretched little kitchen. "What is it? When on earth did you start cooking it?"

"It's coq au vin," he said, lifting out an earthenware casserole and slamming the oven door. He was as deft as a cat in the kitchen. "Otherwise known as chicken in wine. It's got chicken, ham, little white onions and garlic, seven herbs, mushrooms, and a slosh of red wine. Chambertin is best, but I can't get that here, so this is plain old Taylor's table. You flame it with a little cognac and then stick it in the oven for as long as you feel like it. I put this on about five this afternoon."

"How on earth did you know..." I began, and stopped in confusion. Of course he could not have known I would appear in his lab.

"I eat well," he grinned. "And I can do it cheaper than eating at a dining hall or boarding house. If you can call it eating. I make this, or some other kind of stew, once a week and eat on it for days. The only real expense is the cognac, and I've had this bottle for six months. The temptation to scarf it down by itself is great, but I'm only a so-so drinker, and I am a devoted, fanatical eater."

"I've never even tasted cognac," I said.

He looked at me and lifted a dark eyebrow.

"What? A rich little girl like you?"

I started to protest, and then did not. All of a sudden, in the midst of all this rich, careless beauty and exotica and worldliness, my phony wealth seemed almost all I had going for me.

"My father was a martini man," I said lightly.

"Was?" he said.

"He died," I said neutrally. "At the end of my first year at Randolph Macon."

"And you came back to be closer to your mother. I wondered what you were doing at Randolph."

"You're here," I said carelessly, hoping he would drop it.

"I have to be. You don't," he said. "Well. I'm sorry about your father. Shouldn't you call your mother, then? I don't want to get on her bad side before I've even met her."

"She really isn't expecting me until tomorrow," I said, not looking at him. "I'm going to go back and sleep at the house tonight. I don't have to sign in, and there's a basement door that's always open."

He laughed.

"Always leave yourself an escape hatch," he said. "Well, in that case, let's eat."

It was an enchanted meal. Probably as near a perfect one as I have ever had. I have never forgotten it, and I know that I never will. Partly it was the strange and wonderful food; strange at least to me. Besides the coq au vin he produced a crusty loaf of walloping chewy bread that he said he had made himself, and a platter of apples and grapes and an odd, soft, nutlike cheese for afterward, and kept our stemmed glasses filled with the tart, dry red wine. We ate on lacquered trays in the living room, I in the armchair and he in the Eames. He put a stack of records on the hi fi set he had assembled in the bookcase, and soft, sensuous music with the sun and sea in it swam through the room. A candle burned in a beautiful pottery candlestick on the bookcase, and he lowered the lamplight with a rheostat. After dinner he brought us each a tiny, jewel-like glass of the cognac, and made bitter, smoky espresso on a battered copper machine he pulled out from under the kitchen counter. I was more than slightly drunk on the wine and music and strangeness and his physical presence, and felt both serene and detached, and reckless and clever and worldly. I laughed a great deal, and tossed my head to feel my hair swing against my cheek, and felt about thirty-five years old and incomparably chic in the sun of his lazy grin.

He got up to clear the dishes, flicking on an Edith Piaf record as he went. The dusky lament overflowed the room. I got unsteadily to my feet, almost losing my balance.

"Whoops," I mouthed silently, balancing against the rough white wall. I peered in to see if he had noticed; he had not. Laughter welled up in my chest. I remember thinking, if this is what it is to be drunk, I see why people do it.

My eye fell on a framed sketch, and I leaned closer to look at it. All senses opened and heightened by the liquor and the man, I stared at it, widening my eyes to focus it. It swam into sharp focus and I drew in my breath, as I had when I had first seen the room. It was a watercolor sketch of a low, carved white building spilling down a rock ledge over a burning blue sea. One graceful, gull-roofed wing of it soared out over the rock and hung over the sea itself; its seaward wall was a long curve of glass, and its roofline made a sweeping, carved overhang, so that the sea light would flood in, but not the fierce, remorseless sun. It was purely, absolutely beautiful; it looked like a seabird just lit on the cliff. I knew with certainty that he had designed it.

I felt him behind me and turned. He was looking at it impassively.

"It's incredible," I said. "It's yours, isn't it?"

"It's my design," he said. "It never got built. It was going to be a house in Morocco. The cantilevered wing is a studio."

Light dawned. It was to have been his house, his and the dead Berthe's.

"I'm sorry you never got to live in it," I said. I was. The simple sadness of it brought tears to my eyes.

"I will," he said. "I may be eighty years old, and I may have to rob or commit murder, but I will live in that house. It's a condition of living at all, that house."

He laughed then, and I looked over my shoulder at him again. It was not a laugh I had heard before.

"It was a condition from the very beginning," he said. "It was a condition of staying in France and being a good little bourgeois husband and son-in-law. I would stick around Orleans with Berthe half the year and my prince of a father-in-law would finance this house for us, and we could spend the other half in it. I can't tell you how close I came to accepting that condition. To paying that price. I might have done it, if the thing with McKim hadn't come up."

"You'll build it, on an American beach," I said around the lump in my throat.

"Yeah, I will," Paul said. "But when I think how long it's going to take to be able to afford it, I get a little crazy. So I just try not to."

"Could you...can you, you know, scale it down a little? Build it somewhere else, build it cheaper?" I said, "Not so big, and so avant garde? Almost every inch of that house would have to be custom..."

"No, I can't," he said. "I'm surprised you don't understand that I can't."

His voice was cold and flat, as if he stood a far distance from me. I felt the tears slide over the rim of my lids and start down my cheeks. I shut my eyes and prayed that I would not cry with the hurt.

I heard him sigh, and he took me by the shoulders and led me to the daybed and pulled me down on it, beside him. He held my hand loosely in his, and looked off into the middle distance, while I struggled not to yield to the tears.

"I want to tell you something, so you'll understand, and then we won't have to talk about it again," he said. "I don't tell people this because it sounds like I'm trying for sympathy, and there's nothing I hate more than that. But I need for you to understand about the architecture and about that house, because until you do you won't understand me. And nothing at all can work for us until you do."

He looked at me and made a half-exasperated, half-amused sound and reached over and thumbed the tears off my face.

"Shit, Kate, don't turn into a cryer on me," he said. "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I'll try not to snarl if you'll try not to cry. Deal?"

I nodded, unable to look at him.

"Okay. My mother was a Seminole Indian from the Everglades outside Miami. She was born in them and she died in them. I don't know if you've ever seen the Everglades, but it isn't fit country for anything but rattlesnakes and alligators and, of course, Seminoles. There was a settlement of 'Noles back in there, in tarpaper shacks on stilts, so far back that the water was always black and the air was always gray and the sun never got through the moss and trees. The mud stank and the mosquitoes never stopped and the heat never let up. Some of the old people had spent their whole lives there. I was born there, and lived there for the first seven years of my life..." He paused, and then laughed the tight, bad laugh I had heard before.

"You know, people are always pissing and moaning about the fires in the Everglades, and the droughts, and the poaching, and how they're a national treasure and we've got to save them for future generations. But I tell you, if mine could be the hand that lit the fire that burned that fucking murdering swamp to hell I'd die a happy man.

"Anyway, my mother was a squatty, dark little lady with no schooling and no skills and no maternal instincts to speak of. She lived to drink, and to drink she had to hook, and she did hook, whenever she ran out of booze. She'd bring her gentlemen friends back to the shack, or they'd show up sniffing around it, and they'd go at it with me on my little pallet in the corner. I had standing orders to turn my head to the wall when she brought a date home. That's what she called them, dates. Until I married, I thought you couldn't fuck without yelling like a wildcat or a Seminole. I never knew who my father was because my mother didn't. It could have been one of those guys who came to the 'Glades, for all I know. Most of them were crackers. I know I've got a lot of white blood in me."

I made a small sound of horror and he waved me quiet.

"It wasn't all bad," he said. "I had an uncle, Uncle Jimmy, her older brother, and he was good to me. After she got to drinking so bad he used to take me to work with him sometimes. He was a framer for construction companies, and a good one. He always had work. He was little and dark and catlike, like her, and there wasn't anywhere he couldn't go, hand over hand, like a monkey. I'd sit on the ground under a tree being real quiet and watch him. He worked for Sibley Construction the year I was born, and that's how I got my last name. My mother just told them that at the county hospital and they put it down. Hell, who cared about one more skinny, squalling little 'Nole?

"The year I was six Uncle Jimmy was working on a big house out on the ocean, one of those fifty-room jobs with the big stone fence and the iron gates and the pools and the fountains and tennis courts. He took me out to see it on a Sunday, when there wasn't anybody else around. We walked all through it, and my eyes were just getting bigger and bigger, and something was happening to my heart, and I could smell the wet concrete and the plaster dust and the sand and black earth in the sun, and see the ocean beyond, cool and clean and free, and it just came to me that I was going to build those babies, too. Design and build them, I mean. I think I can remember having this distinct sense even then about how you would do it. And then he took me out back to this kind of white tower that stood all by itself in a grove of palms, and we climbed up the outside steps and at the top there was this round white room with glass on all sides, looking straight out to sea over the top of the palms. All you could see was clean blue sky and clean blue sea and gulls, and way off in the sea, little white sails. Christ, it was so clean up there. That was the thing that got me. I'd never seen clean like that before, or light, or space. And the wind flowed through singing like a river. The floor was white tile, and the walls white stucco, and the ceiling...white. White and empty and cool and clean. And beyond it more clean blue, clear to the end of the world.

"I remember that I said to him, 'I can do this.' And he just looked at me and said, 'Yes, you can, and you do it, Paulie. You get out of there and you do it.' "

He was quiet for so long that I thought that was the end of the story. I felt that my heart would burst with sorrow for him.

"And you did do it," I whispered.