Sometimes she would deliberately look thirty-five, so that young men in their early twenties would be attracted to her and consider her to be an older, experienced woman.

She could perform perfectly the role of a still glamorous but fading thirty-five-year-old woman, having studied so many of them in Hollywood, New York, Paris, Rome, London, etc.

She’d already had three affairs with young men in their early twenties without them ever catching on that she was only fifteen.

It had become a little hobby of hers.

She could invent whole lifetimes for herself and it was as if she had lived them in a kind of dreamy telescope way. She could be a thirty-four-year-old matron with three children in Glendale married to a Jewish dentist and having a lost youth fling on the side or she could be a thirty-one-year-old spinster literary editor from New York trying to escape the clutches of an insane lesbian lover and needing a young man to provide her salvation from perversion or she could be a thirty-year-old divorcée with an incurable but attractive disease and wanting to have one more chance at romance before…

She loved it.

She got out of bed and tiptoed without any clothes on into the living-room and went over to the door of her father’s bedroom and stood there listening to see if they were awake or making love.

Her father and his lover were sound asleep. She could feel it through the door. It was like a chunk of warm frozen space in their bedroom.

She opened the door a crack and saw the blonde hair of the woman spilling over the side of the bed like the sleeve of a yellow shirt.

She smiled and closed the door.

And that’s where we leave her.

We know a little about her.

And she knows a lot about us.

A Short History of Oregon

I would do things like that when I was sixteen. I’d hitch-hike fifty miles in the rain to go hunting for the last hours of the day. I’d stand alongside the road with a 30:30 and my thumb out and think nothing of it, expecting to be picked up and I always was.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Deer hunting.’

That meant something in Oregon.

‘Get in.’

It was raining like hell when I got out of the car at the top of the ridge. The driver couldn’t believe it. I saw a draw half-full of trees, sloping down into a valley obscured by rain mist.

I hadn’t the slightest idea where the valley led to. I’d never been there before and I didn’t care.

‘Where are you going?’ the driver said, hardly believing that I was getting out of the car in the rain.

‘Down there.’