And so today, with Sabina walking at his side believing she could destroy the corrosive mother by enacting her opposite, by full attentiveness to his secret wishes, not dancing with others, not flirting, never whining, focusing the full searchlight of her heart upon him, his eyes did not see her alone, but Sabina and a third woman forever present in a perpetual triangle, a ménage à trois, in which the mother's figure often stood between them, intercepting the love Sabina desired, translating her messages to Donald in terms of repetitions of early disappointments, early treacheries, all the mother's sins against him.

He kneeled at her feet to re-lace the sandal which was undone, an act he performed with the delicacy not of an enamored man, but of a child at a statue's feet, of a child intent on dressing woman, adorning her, but not for himself to claim. In performing these adulations he fulfilled a secret love for satin, for feathers, for trinkets, for adornment, and it was a caress not to Sabina's feet but to the periphery of all that he could caress without breaking the ultimate taboo: touching his mother's body.

To touch the silk which enwrapped her, the hair which stemmed from her, the flowers she wore.

Suddenly his face, which had been bent over the task, lifted to her with the expression of a blind man suddenly struck with vision. He explained: "Sabina! I felt a shock all through my body while I tied your sandals. It was like an electric shock."

And then as quickly, his face clouded with the subdued light of filtered emotions, and he returned to his neutral zone: some early, pre-man fin-knowledge of woman, indirect, enveloping, but without any trace of a passageway for erotic penetration. Brushings, silken radiations, homage of eyes alone, possession of a little finger, of a sleeve, never a full hand on a bare shoulder but a flight from touch, wavelets and rivulets of delicate incense, that was all that flowed from him to her.

The electric shock sank beneath his consciousness.

By touching her naked foot he had felt a unity resembling the first unity of the world, unity with nature, unity with the mother, early memories of an existence within the silk, warmth and effortlessness of a vast love. By touching her foot this empty desert which lay between him and other human beings, bristling with all the plants of defenses, the cactus varieties of emotional repellents, grown impenetrable between himself and other young men, even when they lay body to body, was annihilated. There were sensual acts in which he had not felt this sudden flowing together which had happened between her naked foot and his hands, between the heart of her and the core of himself. This heart of Sabina's, which he imagined panoplied for refuge, and the core of himself, which he had never felt before except as the crystal structure of his young man's body which he knew, in her presence, he discovered to be soft and vulnerable.