“It’s my body,” she said, a woman ahead of her time. He wondered if inside every conventional housewife there was such a sexual radical. She took mercy on him: “Don’t worry—I’m about to have my period. You’re safe.” She laughed then, a brief tough snicker, as if her voice had been lowered by momentary empathy with a man’s point of view.

After sleepwalking through the day, they gained a second wind when night fell on the duned, saguaro-dotted desert. “Your place, or mine?” he had asked.

“Yours,” Alice said. Having a choice—a little play in their situation—amused her. “I hate that nasty little overhang; my feet get claustrophobic.” His slightly higher roomette had no such feature. They could spread out, relatively. Having mounted the two steps, they felt on top of the world. Their three days, he often reflected, had composed a courtship, a honeymoon, and a marriage. You fuck at first to stake a claim, and afterwards to keep the claim staked. They were less ravenous this second night together, and tender in their genitals, and slept for several stretches of an hour or more. They could hear, in the sudden gulp and changed pitch, as of a great musical instrument, the train entering tunnels, and feel its wheels carefully fumble over the switch points at some crucial junction. They could feel the train climb and sinuously labor through some pass, on a canyon’s curved edge, beneath the unseen stars hanging cold and close above the desert mountains. As he sensed the night tilting and slowly swerving toward its end, Bech in his sexual hysteria and exhaustion began to cry, smearing his tears with his face, like a deer marking a tree, across her belly, her breasts, a kind of spiritual semen, leaving its own slimy glitter. As she submitted to this, she patted and tugged his thick, resilient hair.

The line of people with books to sign had no end in sight. “Would you just make this one ‘To Roger’? He’s my grandfather, he loves your work, he says you’ve really spoken for his generation.” “Could you personalize this one ‘For the Inimitable Lyndi’? That’s ‘L,’ ‘Y,’ ‘N,’ ‘D,’ ‘I.’ No ‘E.’ Perfect. Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to have you here in the Hoosier State.”