He sought to capture the recurrence of certain words in her talk, thinking they might be used as keys, but if the word "actress," "miraculous," "travel," "wandering," "relationship" did occur frequently, it remained impossible to know whether or not she used them in their literal sense or symbolically, for they were the same to her. He had heard her say once: "When you are hurt, you travel as far as you can from the place of the hurt," and when he examined her meaning found she was referring to a change of quarters within fifty blocks in the city of New York.

She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her into lifting the veil slightly, only a corner of it, and then frightened when anyone listened too attentively, especially Jay whom she did not trust, whom she knew found the truth only in the sense of exposure of the flaws, the weaknesses, the foibles.

As soon as Jay listened too attentively, she took a giant sponge and erased all she had said by an absolute denial as if this confusion were in itself a mantle of protection.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world, then she blurred the passageways, confused all the images as if to elude detection.

"False mysteries," said Jay savagely, baffled and irritated by her elusiveness. "But what is she hiding behind these false mysteries?"

Her behavior always aroused in him (in the kind of mind he had with an obsession for truth, for revelation, for openness, brutal exposure) a desire which resembled the desire of a man to violate a woman who resists him, to violate a virginity which creates a barrier to his possession. Sabina always incited him to a violent desire to rip all her pretenses, her veils, and to discover the core of her self which, by this perpetual change of face and mobility, escaped all detection.

How right he had been to paint Sabina always as a mandrake with fleshly roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple-bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. How right he had been to paint her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from caverns, from behind trees, as one of the luxuriant women, a tropical growth, excommunicated from the bread line as too rich a substance for everyday living, placing her there merely as a denizen of the world of fire, and content with her intermittent, parabolic appearances.

"Sabina, do you remember our elevator ride in Paris?"

"Yes, I do remember."

"We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets. I remember it was your idea to take an elevator."