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where, while feeding each other crème brûlée, they were asked to leave. On the third beach down from Fullerton. Maude laid claim to Alice and Alice, in turn, surrendered the territory of herself. She made herself utterly vulnerable, and not just sexually. By two weeks in, she had told Maude so much of her darkest stuff—unsavory fantasies, of course, but also low moments of pettiness and envy, descriptions of various embarrassments. She could make herself thrillingly ill imagining the betrayal and treachery ahead. Still, all this exposure seemed necessary to set their course.
    They broke only for work and Maude’s classes. She was finishing up her nursing degree. (She put Alice’s limbs into splints, made the bed with Alice still in it, listened to Alice’s heart, checked the pressure of the blood in her veins.) She said there wouldn’t be enough years in front of the camera to make a career of modeling; she would need a backup.
    Maude wasn’t out as a dyke; this was not the whole problem, but it was the largest piece. She was the daughter of a mother who ran a tight ship. Marie’s children were expected to get married, to someone Marie approved of. Someone Catholic. Then it was time for a baby, a bun in the oven. And then, they didn’t want little Timmy or Lucy to grow up an only child, did they? The family was already on Carmen to get knocked up again. Family was what mattered, and got celebrated at every possible occasion. Weddings of course, baptisms, first communions, confirmations, anniversaries. Maude had not yet found a way to let her mother know how far she had veered off this program. Marie already thought Maude’s friendship with Alice was unhealthy. Alice couldn’t really blame Maude for ducking, but she still didn’t like being forced back into the closet herself. This was, she supposed, one of the pitfalls of bringing someone out.
    That she wouldn’t be able to bring Maude all the way over wasn’t her biggest fear. In a deep recess, an inchoate space where thoughts tumble around, smoky and unformed, Alice’s biggest fear was that she and Maude and the accident were tied in an elaborate knot—that her true punishment for what happened that night would be God, or the gods, or the cosmos giving her Maude, then taking her away. But this had not happened yet.
    Maude told Alice the worst medical story. She had been working at the hospital long enough that by now there was a worst. It was a degloving, a man brought in from a factory accident. He’d been caught in a machine, his skin peeled off in one piece down the bottom half of his body. Maude had degloved Alice’s soul. If Maude left, Alice supposed she would never get over her, that the application of time—even in great quantities—would not be up to the job of getting over Maude.
    This, of course, put Alice in a very bad position. She could never quite be relaxed and normal around Maude. A haze of supplication, she knew, hovered over her like incense at an altar. This was another part of the problem. Maude would have had to be a better person notto use this advantage, and she was not; she was merely an ordinarily good person. Maybe, Maude would speculate, when she’d finished school she should move to New York for a while, to wring as much as she could out of modeling. Or she should move to L.A. to see if she could break into movies. Her fascination with hypothetical versions of herself was bottomless.
    When she was attentive to Alice, though, it was with such ferocity and ardor that Alice was stunned, went around for days at a time exhausted and exhilarated, bleary, bumping into things, her spatial sense way out of whack, her mouth bruised, her joints aching, hollows under her eyes, her appetite engaged only by strong lures. M&Ms. Fries with mayonnaise.
    Alice saw this disorientation as a good thing, maybe the best thing, but Maude was ambivalent. She would suddenly get claustrophobic. Alice was too close for comfort, or too intense, or too