Junkies. A startling word, in the mouth of someone like Vann.

“… sometimes they break in downstairs, spend the night, that’s okay with most of us, but there’ve been fires started in the winter …”

He has become a property owner, L.K. thinks. A bourgeois. Concerned for the safety of his art.

Vann fuming about junkies endears him to L.K., oddly.

She is thinking that if he touches her, she will not draw away. Perhaps she will touch him, fingers brushing against his wrist, his arm. Allowing the man to know how she feels about him.

(But how does L.K. feel, exactly? Like a sleepwalker whose eyes are partly shut, uncertain where she is and where she is going.)

If Vann kisses her, a mist will rise in her brain. That mist of passivity, oblivion. A promise of oblivion.

She will respond to the man, blindly. She will kiss him in return. Instinct will take over, she will not be obliged to think.

The fade-out of the movie screen. The curtain lowered.

But life isn’t aesthetic, like art. She will have to see the man, close up. And he will see her, unblinking.

Indeed L.K. feels a mild repugnance at the prospect of becoming physically—sexually—involved with this man. She has no wish to see him unclothed—naked. If they spend time together intimately, she will hear him coughing, clearing his throat. Breathing heavily. Grunting.

Bathroom noises, a toilet flushing. She has lived alone for so long now, being in close quarters with another person, with a man, will be lacerating to her nerves.

Vann has unlocked the padlock to the door of his studio. As she steps inside, L.K. is surprised—more than surprised, astonished—at the dimensions of the space, its high ceiling, skylights, buffed plank floor, floor-to-ceiling windows emitting an eerie incandescent light. The room is part living quarters, part studio. Very impressive.

L.K. feels a stab of chagrin, she’d underestimated the man. Not for the first time in her experience with strangers, she’d been condescending to him.

Clearly Vnn is a successful artist. Or Vnn has money from a source other than art.

Or, what is equally likely, the artist has very good taste and has made of a crude storage space something resembling a work of art in itself.

“It’s—beautiful.”

“Is it! I’m glad that you think so.”

Vann’s face is flushed with pleasure. He’d wanted to impress her, she thinks. And so he has.

The loft is a large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling of metal girders. In the living area are a black leather sofa, several leather chairs, a low-slung table fashioned of a single piece of burnished redwood. There are lamps carved from wood, with translucent shades. Lights descend from the ceiling on narrow poles or rise from the floor. On the floor are scattered Moroccan carpets. In an interior alcove, what looks like a small kitchen. Behind black-lacquered Japanese screens is the artist’s work area.