Lingually, the old man was by no means sophisticated, hardly in my league, but it seemed apparent that we shared a common interest in the subtleties and textures of the English language. I also noted a challenge in his eyes, one to which I could not help but respond.

"Tie the knot," I said grimly.

"Tie-up," said Delbert. "Like with traffic."

"Tied down," I said. "As in busy, occupied."

"Railroad tie," he said.

"Ties of marriage," I said.

"Tie tack," he said.

"Tycoon," said I.

Delbert frowned. "No way, man. That one doesn't count."

"Spoilsport. Very well, then-tied score."

"Tongue-tied," he shot back. "Tie-dye. Tie into. Tie that binds. My hands are tied."

I shrugged.

"Not bad," I said, and poured the old gentleman a whiskey. One had to admire his competitive spirit. "If you're interested, we could try the word lost. In fact, there's an excellent story that goes with it."

"A tie-in?" Delbert said.

"Right," I said crossly. "A tie-in. But there's nothing worse than a show-off."

Thus, in swift narrative strokes, while Delbert mopped the floor, I brought him up-to-date on my current situation, abandoned by one and all, and how my plight had antecedents back during the war-deserted then, deserted now. I told him about the mountains, my six traitorous comrades, the old villa where eventually I found refuge. "There I was," I said, "sound asleep on that cot, and what finally woke me up were these-"

"Voices," said Delbert.

"Voices. Yes."

"Your buddies," the old man said. He leaned on his mop. "I figure it was your buddies, right? The ones that dumped you?"

I glared at him.

"Sorry, sir. Just trying to speed things up."

"Speed," I said curtly, "is irrelevant."

The old man glanced at a clock behind the bar. "But it was your buddies, right? And I figure they were using the place to hide out-like a base or something."

I took time refilling my glass.

For a professional teacher-perhaps for all of us-there is little more irritating than to be cut short by incompetent guesswork.

"On the most simplistic level," I said, "I suppose you're right. My comrades, yes. A base of operations. But that's hardly the point." For a few seconds I rebuked him with silence. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd be happy to fill you in. The subject is lost."

The old man fidgeted. "Well, sir, it sounds interesting, but I've got toilets to clean."

"Fine. I'll join you."

"Sir, I don't think-"

"Lead the way," I said resolutely. "The labor may help you concentrate."

Until that early Tampa morning, I had no idea how many public rest rooms the typical hotel contains. More than a score, in point of fact. At least two for each bar, each restaurant, each ballroom, each swimming pool, each sauna and fitness room and major corridor. Plus the lobby. Plus recreation and utility rooms. It was an arduous morning, in other words, both for myself and for my new friend, Delbert. (I was going on no sleep; Delbert was going on seventy-five years.) We divided up the labor, more or less-I handled the talking, Delbert the brush work-but I dare say that by noon both of us were approaching the end of our respective tethers.

My behavior, I must confess, had become a trifle erratic. Compulsively jabbering. Easily distracted.

In general, I do not respond well to physical fatigue, or to tension, but I now felt positively overwhelmed by the loose ends in my life-Lorna Sue and Herbie and the tycoon and Mrs. Robert Kooshof. On top of this, each hour seemed to bring still other distractions and complications: first Toni, then Peg and Patty, and now I found myself plodding dizzily from commode to commode in the company of a smart-ass old janitor.

My entire life, it seemed, had become a great looping digression.

Nonetheless, though groggy and exhausted, I was determined to complete my tale. "To be honest," I told Delbert, "you were pretty much on target. My so-called buddies, it seems they were Green Beret types. Using the old villa to stage all kinds of nasty business. Covert, of course."

"Covert?" the old man said.

"You know. Secret."

Delbert leaned over a toilet bowl and gave it a vigorous workout with his scrub brush. "I know what covert is. But what's the point?"

"Betrayal," I told him. "Betrayal and loss."

He looked up with moderate interest. "Famous old tag team," he said. "Betrayal and loss. But if you ask me, sir, you should get yourself some sleep."

"Soon," I said. "First the story."

The old man handed me his brush. "All right, I'll listen," he said wearily. "Finish up that toilet for me. Those other ones too."

"You don't mean ...?"

"Good and sterile."

Delbert lit up a pipe and took a seat in the adjoining stall. Fleetingly, though not for the first time, I felt the squeeze of dislocation-that blurred, random sensation.

I sighed and rolled up my sleeves. Sanitation was not my cup of tea and never would be, yet there comes a time when one must pay a price for human sympathy.

I dipped in with my brush.

"You awake?" I said.

"Absolutely," said Delbert. "Nasty business. Covert."

My six comrades-if "comrades" is the proper term-did not seem in the least surprised to see me. On the contrary, they scarcely looked up when I marched down the stairs that morning. There were no apologies, no explanations.

The old villa, as it turned out, was situated barely a half mile from our original ambush site, and over the past several days I had been wandering mostly in circles, recrossing my own path several times. Apparently, too, my comrades had been keeping tabs on me the whole while, watching me traipse along-no doubt snickering at my ineptitude-and in at least one important sense, it could be said that I had never been lost at all. (A curious bit of relativism. Lost can be viewed as both a state of mind and a state of being, and the two conditions are not always in harmony. One can feel lost without being lost. One can be lost without feeling lost. Very tricky.) Even so, I protested. I accused them of deserting me, leaving me to the mosquitoes, yet this outrage seemed not to register. "No sweat," one of them said, a wiry little youth with the nickname Spider. "We had you totally covered, man. Like a blanket."

"Wet fuckin' blanket," someone else said, and the others laughed.

The general mood, however, was mirthless.

"What I recommend you do," said Spider, "is consider yourself blessed. You once was lost, now you're found. Let it go at that."

"Amen," said Tulip.

There was no point in pursuing the matter. Clearly, these six sadists had their own agenda, which did not include the care and feeding of orphans like myself, and I swiftly opted for a course of caution. I was alive, after all-freshly found-and my goal was to stay that way.

Over the next several days, a predictable routine set in. I was assigned a cot, a footlocker, regular chores around the villa. By daylight, I spent most of my time on KP, preparing meals, cleaning up after the others, and then at night, most often with Spider, I pulled four or five hours of guard duty. None of this was pleasant, to be sure, but on the whole I preferred it to the jungle. I kept my mouth shut, my ears open, and gradually a few salient facts began to surface.

The villa was part of an old French tea plantation, long abandoned, and for months my comrades had been using the place as a base of operations. They were all Special Forces-"Greenies," in their own self-congratulatory parlance. When they spoke to me, which was not often, it was in a brusque, clandestine code, to which I had no key. Everything was hush-hush. Their voices, their style, even their mission. In the late afternoons, just before dusk, two or three of them would sometimes slip off into the rain forest, gliding away without a word, then returning a day or two later with the same oily stealth. Even their names were classified. They went by aliases and nothing else-Spider, Goof, Wildfire, Death Chant, Tulip, Bonnie Prince Charming. Not that I cared. My sole concern was staying found.

So I followed orders, bided my time. A week went by, maybe two weeks. Sooner or later, I reasoned, we would be returning to the firebase, and until then it seemed prudent to get along with my six spooky compatriots.

All in all, it was a ticklish period, obviously, but not without occasional delights. Sometimes, in the mellow hours of afternoon, it was easy to forget that we were in the heart of a war zone: drinks on the veranda, a quick dip in the pool, perhaps a leisurely stroll before dinner. Like a resort, I'd think. Very peaceful, no pressures. Twice a week, by some peculiar arrangement, a dozen or so Vietnamese civilians would appear out of the jungle-mostly female-and under a blazing white sun they would spend the day tending the villa's lawn and gardens. When my own chores were finished, I sometimes looked on while they raked and hoed and trimmed. To my mind, at least, there was something decorous about it, something tranquil and reassuring. It was as if the villa had been snagged in a time warp, a dreamy regression to a more exotic era-the tropical heat, the languor, those mysterious, brown-skinned women toiling away in their straw hats and bare feet.

Erotic, I thought. And I liked that too.

One of these young laborers, in fact, had taken a fancy to me, and on occasion I would invite her up to the veranda for a glass of lemonade. Her age was hard to guess: maybe sixteen, maybe twenty. Slender and delicately boned, with bashful black eyes, the girl reminded me of a little gazelle, alert and tentative, ready to bolt. Her name, as she spelled it out for me, was Thuy Ninh, which to my Western ear sounded uncannily like "Take In." Who would not be captivated? The very sound thrilled me, and with those two seductive syllables, so crisp and tantalizing, I imagined she was issuing an invitation of sorts, maybe even a promise.

Sometimes we would hold hands. Sometimes she would give me a shy little smile.

"You will love me?" she said.

"You didn't?" said Delbert from the adjoining stall.

"I had to."

"Had to? She was just a kid, I thought."

"Advanced for her age. Insistent too. She virtually forced me."

Delbert issued a sharp sound of disapproval, which echoed through the tiled rest room, and the judgmental snap in his voice instantly brought to mind a certain childhood confrontation with Lorna Sue. The same moralistic piety. ("You kissed Faith Graffenteen's face! You kissed her snotty nose!" To which I had responded as I was still responding: "She forced me." Incredible, is it not, how our earth revolves in such precise, repetitive circles?) I scrubbed silently for a time, working on a stubborn stain at the bottom of a commode. "It may be difficult to believe," I said, "but there is something about me-my manner, my essential selfhood-that women seem to relish."

"Oh, yeah, like Peg and Patty?" said Delbert. The old man snorted. "So you took advantage of this little Vietnamese gal?"

"Not in the least," I said. "Romance. An affair of the heart."

What happened at the villa, I told him, could best be understood as an extension of my life history up to that point, one more chilling episode in a long pattern of sacrificing common sense to the exhausting demands of love.

Even in a war, I could not shake the curse of romance. It was my destiny. The story of my life.

From childhood on, I had been consumed by an insatiable appetite for affection, hunger without limit, a bottomless hole inside me. I would (and will) do virtually anything to acquire love, virtually anything to keep it. I would (and will) lie for love, cheat for love, beg for love, steal for love, ghostwrite for love, seek revenge for love, swim oceans for love, perhaps even kill for love.

Am I alone in this?

Certainly not.

Each of us, I firmly believe, is propelled through life by a restless, inexhaustible need for affection. Why else do we trudge off to work every morning, or withhold farts, or decorate our bodies with precious gems, or attend church, or smile at strangers, or pluck out body hair, or send valentines, or glance into mirrors, or forgive, or try to forgive, or gnash our teeth at betrayal, or pray, or promise, or any of a trillion large and small behaviors that constitute the totality of the human trial on this planet?

All for love.

All to be loved.

In my own case, obviously, this love drive went haywire at a very early stage. Like some horrid cancer, the need for affection multiplied into a voracious, desperate, lifelong craving. The benign became malignant. Desire became compulsion. Hence my hosts of female acquaintances; hence innumerable peccadilloes and compromises and heartaches and broken promises and embarrassments and outright humiliations. In my defense, however, I must quickly declare one other fundamental truth: the motive was never physical. Repeat: never! The motive was love. Only love. Thus, over the course of a spotty career, I have enjoyed carnal relations with a paltry four women. (Or three. Depending.) On the other hand, I can boldly credit to my account one hundred twenty-eight near misses, two hundred twelve love letters, fifteen boxes of chocolates, well over five hundred significant flirtations and alliances and dalliances. (I keep books. I do a rigorous monthly tally. The count counts.) And yet the quantities never proved sufficient. I had to keep fueling the furnace, refilling the hole, topping off my leaky love tank.

-- Which brings us to Thuy Ninh.

Nothing coy about it. "You will love me?" she said.

And so we locked limbs on the billiard table, on my cot, in the swimming pool, in the dusty shade of the rain forest. For me, at least, it was an education, and my learning curve could be judged spectacular. Thuy Ninh would chant her name to me. (Take in!. Take in!) I would gamely oblige. Slim-hipped and girlish, with a libido built on box springs, my vigorous young beauty was plainly well tutored in the ways of joy. Her appetite was healthy, her standards were high. "Like this!" she would demand. Occasionally, I found myself wondering where she had acquired such skills, at once so technical and so bawdy, but in my naive way, blinded by romance, I chalked it up to precociousness and the influence of the jungle.

One afternoon, I recall, we lay entwined at the lip of a deep gorge behind the villa. (Cool and shaded, the place was among our favorite love venues. A narrow river descended from the mountains, passed through the gorge, then plummeted ten or fifteen feet in a magnificent little waterfall.) We had already made love twice that afternoon; we were now embarking on session three. In the speckled sunlight, Thuy Ninh's eyes had become moon slices, the irises in high orbit, tiny slivers of black sailing sideways beneath her upper lids. The soles of her feet were thrust skyward. She did a squeezing trick with her thighs, rolled me onto my back, screamed at the sky.

All this was memorable in its own right. But adding to the frenzy was an impressive B-52 strike in the mountains to the west. The planes themselves were invisible. The consequences were not. Over Thuy Ninh's bare shoulders, I could see the distant jungle take fire-bright orange, bright violet, bright black. An entire mountainside collapsed. Seconds later a heated wind swept down the gorge, soon followed by several rapid concussions. Thuy Ninh seemed not to notice. She arched her back and exploded. There were secondary explosions too, plus aftershocks, and then I closed my eyes and unloaded my own devastating tonnage.*

Afterward, Thuy Ninh laughed. "Sergeant Superman," she said.

But it was not just sex.

The girl had snagged my affections; she filled up that part of me that needed filling. For once, it seemed, I had found something unimpeachable and pure. Granted, the physical pleasures were wondrous, but so, too, were all the simple things. Curling around her at night. Holding hands-that perfect fit.

On the veranda one evening, as my comrades looked on, I taught Thuy Ninh the waltz, humming in her ear, and for the moment we could have been actors in some silver-screen musical. At the finale, my six comrades offered tepid applause.

"Heartwarming," Death Chant said.

"The cockles," said Bonnie Prince Charming.

Goof yawned. "This dude's heart," he said wearily, "is where his dick should be."

Not much later, the six of them trooped inside. When they were gone, Thuy Ninh and I sat alone on the veranda.

"What was all that?" I said.

"That?"

"You heard them."

The girl looked at me for a moment, almost in tears. "Must go," she said, then stood up, kissed me, and hurried off into the shadows of the rain forest.

Something odd had just occurred-a secret commentary, a secret reproach-and although it was a mystery to me, I had trouble sleeping that night. The unease stayed with me over the next several days. At times I caught Thuy Ninh studying me with a kind of apprehension; other times I had the feeling that my comrades were enjoying a droll, slightly macabre insight into the world.

"This tale," said Delbert from the adjoining stall, "seems told by an idiot. Doesn't signify jack-anything."

"It soon will," I assured him.