"These must take hours," he said.

"Hours."

"How many have you done?"

She pointed to a painted chest at the foot of her bed. "A lot."

"It is beautiful. Exciting."

He sat down on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him about what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him andwhat he did, an artist. He described the hours he had put into his covers, lavishing detail on the flanges and fins of a death-wave generator, distorting and exaggerating his perspectives with mathematic precision, dressing up Sammy and Julie and the others and taking test photographs to get his poses right, painting luscious plumes of fire that, when printed, seemed to burn the slick ink and paper of the cover itself. He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page. Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.

At some point, he noticed that she was looking at him with a strange air of expectancy, or dread, and he stopped. "What is it?"

"Lampedusa," she said.

"What's that? Lampedusa?"

Her eyes widened as she waited, in expectancy or dread. She nodded.

"You mean the island?"

"Oh!" She threw her arms around his neck, and he fell backward on the bed. Moths scattered. The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth's wing.

"Hey!" said Joe. Then she settled her mouth on his and left it there, lips parted, whispering an unintelligible dreambook sentence.

"Hello? Hey! Joe, you up here?"

Joe sat up. "Shit."

"Is that your brother?"

"My cousin Sam. My partner. In here, Sam," he said.

Sammy stuck his head in the door of the bedroom.

"Oh, hi," he said. "Jeez, I'm sorry. I was just-"

"She's a nurse," Joe said, feeling oddly culpable, as if he had somehow betrayed Sammy and must excuse his presence here. He held up his repaired hand. "She fixed it."

"That's great, uh, hi. Sam Clay."

"Rosa Saks."

"Listen, Joe, I was uh-I was just wondering if you were ready to leave this-excuse me, Miss, I know you live here and all-creepy place."

Joe could see that something had upset Sammy.

"What is it?"

"The kitchen…"

"The kitchen?"

"It's black."

Rosa laughed. "True," she said.

"I don't know. I just-I just want to get home, you know. Get to work on that thing. The uh, sorry. Forget about it. I'll see you."

He turned and started out. In Joe's absence, he had undergone a strange experience. He had wandered through the ballroom and a small conservatory behind it and into the mansion's kitchen, where the walls and floor were covered in gleaming black tile and the countertops coated with black enamel. There were a fair number of people crowded in there as well, and, hoping to find a place where he could be alone for just a moment and perhaps use the toilet, he had turned into a large butler's pantry. Here he had come upon the unlikely sight of two men, each wearing, with the overdetermination of a dream, a necktie and a mustache, embracing, their mustaches interlocked in a way that had reminded Sammy, for some reason, of the way his mother used to fit his comb into the bristles of the brush on top of his dresser when he was a kid.

Sammy had backed quickly out of the kitchen and come looking for Joe; he felt that he wanted to leave, right away. He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever having really connected it to human emotion; certainly never to any emotion of his own. It had never occurred to him that two men, even homosexual men, might kiss in that way. He had assumed, to the degree he had ever permitted himself to give it any thought it all, that the whole thing must be a matter of blow jobs in dark alleyways or the foul practices of love-starved British sailors. Rut those men with the neckties and mustaches-they had been kissing the way people kissed in the movies, with care and vigor and just a hint of showiness. One fellow had caressed the other's cheek.

Sammy rummaged through the riot of furs and overcoats draped on hooks in the front hall until he located his own. He settled his hat on his head and went out. He stopped and lingered on the top step. His thoughts were disordered and strange to him. He was appallingly jealous; it was like a heavy round stone had lodged in the center of his chest, but he could not have said for sure whether he was jealous of Joe or of Rosa Luxemburg Saks. At the same time, he was glad for his cousin. It was marvelous that in this big town he had managed to rediscover, a year later, the girl with the miraculous behind. Perhaps she would be able, as Sammy had not, to find a way to distract Joe at least a little from his evident project of getting his clock cleaned by every last German in the city of New York. He turned and looked back at the doorman, a raffish-looking fellow in a greasy gray jacket who leaned against the front door, smoking a cigarette. What had so rattled Sammy about the scene he had witnessed? What was he afraid of? Why was he running away?

"Forget something?" said the doorman.

Sammy shrugged. He turned and went back into the house. Not entirely sure of what he was doing, he forced himself to walk back through the ballroom that was, now that Dali had abandoned his diving costume, filled with happy and confident people who knew what they wanted and whom they loved, and into the black-tiled kitchen. A group of people were standing around the stove arguing about the proper way to make Turkish coffee, but the two men in the pantry had gone, leaving no trace of their presence. Had he imagined the whole thing? Was such a kiss really possible?

"Is he a fairy?" Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands.

Joe was at first shocked by this suggestion, and then suddenly not. "Why would you say that?" he said.

She shrugged. "He has the feel," she said.

"Hmm," Joe said. "I don't know. He is-" He shrugged. "A good boy."

"Are you a good boy?"

"No," Joe said.

He leaned forward to kiss her again. They bumped teeth, and it made him weirdly aware of all the bones in his head. Her tongue was milkand salt, an oyster in his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel her getting ready to push him away, and then after a moment she did.

"I'm worried about him," she said. "He looked a little lost. You should go after him."

"He will be fine."

"Joe," she said.

"Oh." She wanted him, he understood, to leave. They had taken it as far as she was prepared to go now. It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that. "Okay," he said. "Yes. I-I have work to do, too."

"Good," Rosa said. "Go work. Will you call me?"

"May I?"

"UNiversity 4-3212," she said. "Here." She got up and went over to her drawing table and scrawled the number on a sheet of paper, then tore it off and handed it to Joe. "Get whoever it is to absolutely promise to take a message because they're horribly unreliable around here about that kind of thing. Wait a minute." She wrote out another number. "This is my number at work. I work at Life, in the art department. And this is my number at the T.R.A. I'm there three afternoons a week and on Saturdays. I'll be there tomorrow."