All the play stopped. Cypress dropped to the floor in front of Leroy, who took the feathers out of her mouth and kissed her quickly, like “I-love-you-but-we-have-to-talk” kisses can be. With his hands under her chin, he said again, “Did you know that, that you move like her?” Cypress saw herself in the Mojave Desert; stranded homeless, loverless. She saw Azure Bosom take her in and care for her. She did not believe Leroy was trying to get her to renounce Idrina, or the other women she danced with who loved her, the other women who knew that womanhood was as sacred a right as liberty. Her eyes were those of a she-wolf, while her body still lingered for him like a gazelle’s.

“Oh, that’s not surprising. We worked together for a long time when I first came here. I admire Idrina.”

Leroy got up, and walked to the windows. He saw Idrina straddled ’cross the tower of the Empire State Building, legs pushing through clouds, and women floating around her mouth like gulls by the Santa Monica pier. He looked harder, and made the skyline a thousand beds for the French girls who always came in pairs . . . it was more fun that way, they’d say. Then by trial and error he’d have to keep tasting to see which one had the coke on her pussy and which one didn’t. He knew Cypress didn’t belong out there in the sky with the women he remembered, conjured from other days. Yet she had been among them, flung from wing to breast, to tongue, to flight. Would she want that again, a world where he could not be seen? Leroy was too much of a gentleman to reveal the depth of his need for Cypress to want to stay. He’d resisted this kind of closeness ever since his parents died. Cypress might be his chance for true intimacy, but she’d shared so much with so many; while he took as little as possible, gave what could be spared without having to remember. With his back to Cypress, he didn’t see how beautiful she looked in the mirrors; how there were three illusions of her, with the fleshbound Cypress on the floor amidst hominy, feathers, and cloth . . . and more illusions.

“I know all that Cypress. I live with you. I’ve lived in New York for the past eight years. I know who Idrina is.”

Cypress looked at herself in one mirror, then the others. She could see that there was something enticing about her ensemble of kitchenware and petticoats, but there was also something distorted. Was it that Leroy wasn’t saying what he really wanted to say? There was a half-truth hovering; some vestiges of a lie were overtaking them. “Well, I thought I loved her.”