"Yes. A cream Mercedes."

"Convertible?"

"Yes."

"How did I know that? When this rain breaks, I'll follow you to your place."

"Ah..." She put her elbow on the bar and her cheek in her palm, so that she was looking sideways up at me. "May I use the confessional now?"

"Sure. I was almost through anyway. Confess away."

"We can't go to my place."

"Roommate?"

"Sort of. There's my husband and my children. I don't think they'd understand."

I looked at her, and suddenly I felt very tired. "You're not divorced."

"Nope."

"And this isn't your first time out cruising the meat markets."

"Ah... no. Say, could there possibly be such a thing as a triple switch?"

I rubbed my face. "So the Master Stinger got stung, did he? Well, how about that? Not bad, Martha. Not bad at all. Especially for a woman who found my crotch-scam too devious." I pushed off the barstool and went to the window. The rain had thinned to little more than mist, and streetlights were reflecting in shallow pools faintly opalescent with automobile filth. I couldn't tell if the hail had done any damage to my battered old Avanti, but I was sure it had harmed her Mercedes, and that was a comfort.

"Marvin?" She joined me at the window. "One morning a woman who has been a good wife and a busy mother lifts her head from life's tasks, blinks and looks around, and she realizes that she's forty and the parade has passed her by while she was making plans for others. You know what I mean?"

"Please don't batter me with this truth and sincerity stuff. I can't handle it. My whole life has been a celebration of artifice. Down with meaningful relationships! Up with the psychological barriers? Bring on the colorful hang-ups!"

She was silent for a moment. Then: "I see. Well, at least we could console each other by making-what was it? The beast with two backs? I have enough money for a motel."

I sat heavily in a chair by the window. "I'm sure you have, Martha."

She sat across from me. "Your ego's hurt, isn't it."

"Sure. Of course. But that's not really it. It would be pointless for us to make it in some motel with 'Genuine Western Oil Paintings' on the walls. In the morning, our strongest desire would be to shower until the scent of the other person was flushed down the drain. We'd be obliged to make up stories for people who no longer believe us. And a week from now, we wouldn't even remember each other's names. We don't have anything to offer each other, Martha. There's nothing we even want from each other. All there is between us is a low background fever of sexual curiosity."

While I spoke, she smiled at me with amused patience that made it difficult for me to keep my eyes on hers. I felt burned out, vitiated.

Sam Three started up the worn record of As Time Goes By,and Sam One went along the bar telling everyone that the storm was over and he really had to close.

Martha continued to look at me, her eyebrows arched calmly.

"It would be absolutely pointless, Martha. We probably wouldn't even perform very well."

"So what happens now?"

I sighed and stood up. "I'm going to take a walk."

"And me?"

"It's a big night out there. There's room for you to take a walk, too."

"But not together."

"But not together."

She narrowed her eyes and evaluated me. "Marvin, you're really a washout, you know that?"

"Yes, I know."

I left Rick's Cafe Americain and walked around the empty streets for a couple of hours; then I decided I had to get away... go to someplace new and fresh! Canada, maybe. Or the South China Sea. I found my car standing alone in the lot, and I got in and drove north, with the rising sun glancing and glittering through the passenger side window.

But about ten miles out of town, I ran out of gas. I took that as a sign-hey, maybe even a metaphor for my life!-and I managed to get to my committee meeting at the university, unshaven but only a little late.

The people of my village share with all Basque peasants an inborn reluctance to give out any information that might be used to our disadvantage, or, if not actually to our disadvantage, then at least to some other fellow's advantage, which must ultimately be the same thing, for God in His wisdom has seen fit to fill His world with fewer desirable things than there are people chasing after them, and so what the other fellow gets, I don't.

Nowhere is our disinclination to burden others with accurate information more evident than in financial matters. It is common for a shepherd with a fruitful flock to complain long and bitterly, not only because God hates a braggart, or to prevent relatives from asking to borrow money, but also because the posture of poverty gives one moral leverage when selling one's cheese to the traveling wholesalers. The only peasants who do not claim to be impoverished are the truly poor, who seek to avoid the scorn of their neighbors and-even more galling!-the pity of those who might assume that their poverty is God's punishment for wrongs committed by past generations of their family.

No one in my village is fooled by the conventions of speech and behavior that oblige the fortunate to minimize their possessions and the miserable to pretend they haven't a care in the world. Oh, those dim souls from Licq, our neighboring village, might be fooled by such dodges, but not us. We all know that those who pretend to be content with their lot are probably as poor as stones (and perhaps deservedly so, within God's Great Scheme of Retribution), while those who bemoan their poverty most shrilly are secretly well-off, like the Colonel, who became our village's richest man from his practice of snapping up land from the feckless and the unlucky, but who was so tightfisted that he even resented having to pay his share to repair the school's roof. But the Colonel no longer worries about collecting other people's land, not since God reached down last winter and collected him.

Oh yes, we all know how the rich moan while the poor sing, but the glory of the Basque mind lies in its capacity to see subtleties within subtleties, so it is accounted a great gift to be able to judge just howrich are those who complain, and exactly howpoor-and therefore vulnerable in commercial dealings-are those who walk about lighthearted and smiling, like an idiot stunned by a loose tile falling from a roof.

But a wise old Basque dictontells us: Every rule has its exceptions, even this one. Such an exception was the case of old Uncle Arnaud, who never complained about losing his best sheep to wolves and the lightening and never cursed the rich merchants of Paris (known collectively as 'the government') for depressing the price of wool so they could steal it from us. He accepted these strengthening Trials of God with a resigned shrug and a calm smile-exactly as though he were poor, while all the time he was as rich as a tax collector! But even the sly and subtle Uncle Arnaud was not so admired for craft and obliquity as the man who came to earn the title, 'that Fox-of-a-Benat'.

Benat was our village idiot (or 'village innocent' as our parish priest insisted we call him, reminding us that the Treacherous Apple was the fruit of knowledge, and that those who know the least are often-indeed, almost always-better Christians than those burdened with facts and understanding). Every village in those days had at least one village idiot-save for Licq, of course, where nearly everyone could lay claim to that title-and it was not uncommon for dark and dire histories to be attached to these poor souls. Our Benat attracted more creative biography than most, for he lived in the loft of the late Widow Jaureguiberry's barn, where he sustained himself on bread and raw onions-no doubt in penance for some (probably unspeakable) sin. Equally suspect was Benat's custom of taking long walks-not walks such as some lazy dunce of a Licquois might take-but longwalks from which he would return with muddled tales of Saint Palais, fully forty kilometers away down the valley, or of Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, half again as far, and over the mountains! Sometimes people encountered him on the road as he slouched along in his awkward, jerky gait, muttering and grinning to himself in that mysterious way of his, and there was no mistaking our Benat, with his wide, crooked mouth and his huge ears, and eyes set not quite at the same level, to say nothing of the baggy, low-crotched trousers he had worn from longer ago than the collective memory of our village stretches. There were even rumors that Benat had walked all the way to Paris and back, and the fact that he never spoke of Paris lent a certain credibility to these rumors; for isn't it just like an idiot to imagine he has only been to Saint Palais, when in fact he has been in Paris?