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knows very well there are so many matters that I’m going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.
iii
    Later that day, I saw Marietta escorting from the house the woman I’d heard her talking to Zabrina about. She was, like almost all of Marietta’s lovers, blonde, petite and probably no more than twenty years old. By the look of the clothes, I’d guess she was a tourist, perhaps a hitchhiker, rather than a local woman.
    Zabrina had plainly done as Marietta had requested, and relieved the poor woman of her panic (along with any memory of the experience that had induced that panic). I watched them from my balcony through my binoculars. The blank expression on the girl’s face disturbed me. Was this really the only way human beings could deal with the appearance of the miraculous: panic rising to insanity; or, if they were lucky, a healing excision of the memory, which left them like this woman, calm but impoverished? What pitiful options they were. (Which thought brought me back to the book. Was it too grand an ambition to hope that in these pages I might somehow prepare the way for such revelations, so that when they came the human mind didn’t simply crack like a mirror too frail to reflect the wonders before it?) I felt a kind of sadness for the visitor, who had been washed, for her own good, of the very experience that might have made her life worth the living. What would she be after this, I wondered. Had Zabrina
left deep inside her a seed of the memory, which, like the irritant mote in an oyster’s flesh might with time become something rare and wonderful? I would have to ask.
    Meanwhile, under the cover of the trees, Marietta had halted with her companion, and was saying a more than fond goodbye. Having promised to tell the truth, however unpalatable, I can scarcely remain silent on what I saw: she bared the woman’s breasts while I watched; she teased the woman’s nipples and kissed her lips, while I watched, and then, while I watched, she whispered something, and the woman went down onto her knees, unbuckled and unbuttoned Marietta’s pants, and put her tongue into Marietta, flicking it so cunningly I heard Marietta’s yelps from my balcony. Lord knows I’m grateful for whatever pleasures come my way, and I’m not about to pretend that I’m deeply ashamed of watching them make love. It was perfectly wonderful to watch, and when they were finished, and Marietta escorted the woman to the path that winds away from L’Enfant and back into the real world, I felt—though this may seem absurd—a pang of loneliness.
IV
    T hough Marietta had mocked my belief that the house is a kind of listening device, which brings news from all its rooms to the ears of one soul in particular, that very night I had that belief confirmed.
    I do not sleep well; never have, never will. It doesn’t matter how weary I am, as soon as I put my head on my pillow all manner of thoughts, most of them utterly without merit, circle in my skull. So it was last night; fragments of my conversation with Marietta, all rearranged so as to be nonsensical, and punctuated with her libidinous yelps, constituted the soundtrack. But the images were from some other store entirely. Neither Marietta’s face nor form appeared in my mind’s eye; rather the faces and forms of men and women I did not even recognize. No, I take that back. I recognized them; I simply couldn’t name them. Some seemed grotesquely happy with their lot; going naked, some of them, on the streets of what I think was Charleston, darting along the sidewalks and defecating from the chestnut trees. But there were others I dreamed of who were far less happy: one moment blank-faced brothers and sisters to Marietta’s concubine, the next moment