Whenever Jay shook his head kindly, with the slow heavy playfulness of a bear, he was about to say something devastating, which he called his brutal honesty. And Sabina would not challenge this. So she began a swift, spiraling, circuitous story about a party at which indistinct incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which no one could distinguish the heroine or the victim. By the time Jay felt he recognized the place (Montparnasse, seven years ago, a party at which Sabina had actually been jealous of the strong bond between Jay and Lillian which she was seeking to break), Sabina was already gone from there, and talking as in a broken dream, with spaces, reversals, retractions and galloping fantasies.

She was now in Morocco, visiting the Arabian baths with the native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from the prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market place.

"It's coal dust," explained Sabina, "and you place it right inside of the eyes. It smarts at first, and it makes you cry, but that spreads it out on the edge of the eyelids and that is how they get that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes."

"Didn't you get an infection?" asked Jay.

"Oh, no, the prostitutes are very careful to have the kohl blessed at the mosque."

Everyone laughed at this—Mambo who had been standing near, Jay, and two indistinct personages who had been sitting at the next table but who had been sliding their chairs to listen to Sabina. Sabina did not laugh; she was invaded by another memory of Morocco. Jay could see the images passing through her eyes like a film being censored. He knew she was busy eliminating other stories she was about to tell; she might even be regretting the story about the bath, and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a huge blackboard and she took a sponge and effaced it all by adding: "Actually, this did not happen to me. It was told to me by someone who went to Morocco," and before anyone could ask: "Do you mean that you never went to Morocco at all" she continued to confuse the threads by adding that this was a story she had read somewhere or heard at a bar, and as soon as she had erased in the minds of her listeners any face which could be directly attributed to her own responsibility, she began another story...