For someone else’s uncaring, that word again, and unthought-out confiscation of talent. He was going to pay; when was not clearly set in Ever’s mind. But the surety of action was. Today was the start of that action. But that thought paled in the light of the practicalities that he must first tackle to put the reeling world into some kind of shape before he would take it apart.

With, he thought, a pleasure.

*

After the brunch in the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs.

Anne, without very much more conversation, took him to her room and they had sex. That is really the only way to describe it. It was practical and seemed to serve as a physical relief, more on her side, really, than his.

The reveal of the complexion on her face, as skin massaged skin, proved sufficiently disturbing for Ever that he was forced to close his eyes to enable climax.

Her bumps, when the make-up was smudged off, swelled a bright red with a sense of fury at being on her face: he thought they must have been uncomfortable for her as his kisses moved from mouth to cheek and quickly back to mouth. The lingering on the face did not encourage him to lick or taste her skin to take the dew of salty sweat that had started its production from the glands as her motion and energy increased.

Her muscle tone was soft, the skin smooth on the body, but the muscle felt to the touch as if no exercise had flowed through its tissue allowing them just the slightest bit of tension to enable upright posture to be possible. She was, he supposed, really quite weak or he imagined if that was his own musculature, that he would feel weak. Incapable.

The aftermath of the coupling produced an increase in conversation, and during the what do you do and where are you from, a question that seems to obsess the pioneer DNA that carries the genetic instructions swirling in the American, his mind returned to earlier times.

He pondered, or more than pondered, he was profoundly moved, by the fact that this was the first intercourse he had had since his separation. He took in the updated 1930s sensation of the room, with its strange bedspread that now lay crumpled on the end of the bed. Striped, in what he understood to be candlewick, alternating with a smooth cotton in three-inch, he guessed, intervals. Chocolate brown, the candlewick, and cream, the cotton, a stark jolt in the dominantly white room. A terrace, potted with dwarf palmetto palms neighbouring the chairs, now received the fade of the sun, which shrouded the mountains in the distance, giving the feeling of space and an endless freedom. And luxury. Organisation and detail that spoke luxury, and allowed one to bask in that which takes effort and time.

Which is what you pay for.

At least what she was paying for.

*