The mouth. How does one describe a mouth? A mouth is flesh—movement—characterized by those white tips of teeth, by expression, by the rose that deepens when bit, when idly played with by fingertips. The way the shape of a face changes with a smile, a frown, a story, a wedge of pineapple between the molars.

There is no way to describe a face. Not really. No way to explain how it moves. We put women like Lonnie on film—nations fall in love. Not with the women themselves, not with the characters, not with those beautiful features even, but with the movement of their muscles, the way the pliable flesh is stretched across bone, the way it changes. The way it makes us feel something—elation or sadness, it doesn’t matter which. Emotion is a stirring—a movement. We fall in love with a moving body. And so it moves us.

She wore a man’s robe, gold with black trim, and you could tell, the way it plunged down her chest, she was naked underneath. Getting dressed was the last thing she did before leaving the house. She sometimes asked me to zip her dresses, so I ran my fingertips from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck without actually touching her. She would let out a tiny sigh as I was doing it, as if the basic process of putting on clothes depressed her.

At the beach she mixed Pimm’s and 7UP in a thermos, then passed it around and smiled. Something about her posture became unfastened in the sun and she melted into her towel, running her fingers through the sand around her, as if she were raking the whole beach, slowly, inch by inch. She didn’t seem to be listening to anyone; she didn’t say anything; she didn’t read. She just smiled and touched the sand and sometimes put her cheek to her own bronzed shoulder, as if to feel its warmth.

I worried about her in the water. She ran to it like a child who had not yet been hit by an unexpected wave. She always swam out farther than I did. She would turn horizontal to float and I would lose sight of her from my vantage point close to shore.