Fred threw a distressed glance at Lillian, who was laughing. One girl was kissing the lobe of his ear, and the other slipping her hand inside his shirt.

"Lillian, help me."

He could not extricate himself. He had seen them at the beach selling shells, fish, lace. He had seen them entering the church, with black veils over their hair.

Seeing the depth of his distress, Lillian said: "Let's go swimming. It's too hot to dance anymore." It was true: their clothes were glued to their bodies, and their hair looked as if they had been swimming.

The girls clung to Fred: "You stay," they said.

Lillian leaned over to them and said in Spanish: "Some other night. Tonight he feels he must stay with me."

Their hands fell off his shoulders.

Now they were in a taxi, joggling over dirt roads.

Fred did not know that during the evening he had lost his identity in Lillian's eyes and become Gerard, her first defeat at the hands of passivity. A Gerard whose paralysis she now recognized and no longer desired. One could not lust for a wall, an obstacle, an inert mass, yet she had once been seduced by just such gentleness and passivity. It had calmed her fears. She did not know then what she knew now: it had been an encounter with a fear greater than her own. She could desire him violently (Gerard) because she had an instinctive knowledge that he would not respond. She could desire him without restraint (and even admire her own spontaneity) because the restraint was safely prearranged within him. She was free to desire, knowing that she would not be swept away into any fusion. It seemed absurd to say that one would refuse a glass of water when one was thirsty, but if this glass of water also represented all the dangers of love? When Lillian was sixteen or seventeen, fulfillment itself was the danger, love itself was the danger, a shared passion was slavery. She would be at the mercy of another human being. (Just as Fred now feared to be at the mercy of a woman.) Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire. Poor Gerard, what a coward he is. He is afraid of life. It was not, as she thought, the pain of being alive she felt, but the pain of frustration.

How elated she was now not to have been seduced by Fred's mute pleadings and his retractions. How grateful to have discovered not a failed love affair, but the secret of that failure to lie in the choice of partner, a choice which came out of fear. So it was fear which had designed her life, and not desire or love.