At her door he pauses long enough to comb his hair. Now she wears a white pelisse, with sequins all over, padded shoulders, jagged white ostrich plumes at the neckline and wrists. The tiara is gone: in the electricity her hair is new snowfall. But inside a single scented candle burns, and the suite is washed in moonlight. She pours brandy in old flint snifters, and as he reaches, their fingers touch. “Didn’t know you were so daffy about that golf!” Suave, romantic Slothrop.

“He was pleasant. I was being pleasant to him,” one eye kind of squinched up, forehead wrinkled. Slothrop wonders if his fly’s open.

“And ignore me. Why?” Clever pounce there, Slothrop—but she only evaporates before the question, re-forms in another part of the room… .

“Am I ignoring you?” She’s at her window, the sea below and behind her, the midnight sea, its individual waveflows impossible at this distance to follow, all integrated into the hung stillness of an old painting seen across the deserted gallery where you wait in the shadow, forgetting why you are here, frightened by the level of illumination, which is from the same blanched scar of moon that wipes the sea tonight… .

“I don’t know. But you’re fooling around a lot.”

“Perhaps I’m supposed to be.”

“As ‘Perhaps we were meant to meet’?”

“Oh, you think I’m more than I am,” gliding to a couch, tucking one leg under.

“I know. You’re only a Dutch milkmaid or something. Closet full o’ those starched aprons a-and wooden shoes, right?”

“Go and look.” Spice odors from the candle reach like nerves through the room.

“O.K., I will!” He opens her closet, and in moonlight reflected from the mirror finds a crowded maze of satins, taffetas, lawn, and pongee, dark fur collars and trimming, buttons, sashes, passementerie, soft, confusing, womanly tunnel-systems that must stretch back for miles—he could be lost inside of half a minute… lace glimmers, eyelets wink, a crepe scarf brushes his face… Aha! wait a minute, the operational scent in here is carbon tet, Jackson, and this wardrobe here’s mostly props. “Well. Pretty snazzy.”

“If that’s a compliment, thank you.”

Let Them thank me, babe. “An Americanism.”

“You’re the first American I’ve met.”

“Hmm. You must’ve got out by way of that Arnhem, then, right?”

“My, you’re quick,” her tone warning him not to go after it. He sighs, ringing the snifter with his fingernail. In the dark room, with the paralyzed and silent sea at his back, he tries singing:

TOO SOON TO KNOW (FOX-TROT)

It’s still too soon,

It’s not as if we’d kissed and kindled,

Or chased the moon

Through midnight’s hush, as dancing dwindled

Into quiet dawns,

Over secret lawns…

Too soon to know

If all that breathless conversation

A sigh ago

Was more than casual flirtation

Doomed to drift away

Into misty gray…

How can we tell,

What can we see?

Love works its spells in hiding,

Quite past our own deciding…

So who’s to say