Still smiling, Ilka tells us about Denny, who has lips like Mick Jagger’s and delivers stereo components to a chain of stores up and down Highway 101. He’s a drama student at City College whose ex-girlfriend took Ilka’s self-defense class at the College of San Mateo. The first time they met, he motioned her off the freeway in Belmont and bought her a drink in a bar, then took her in his company’s van into the dry October hills, where they made love on the floor among boxes of speakers, turntables, and tape recorders. The van’s back doors hung open so they could watch the planes take off from San Francisco Airport to the north. Ilka tells us that, except for his shaved face, his whole body is covered with black silky hair as smooth as Mika’s skin.

Once every couple of weeks she runs into him—the literalness of this expression when applied to their freeway meetings makes us laugh—and they always drive somewhere in his van: up to Crystal Springs Reservoir, where they make love in the moonlight on the concrete steps of the Pulgas Water Temple; or over the mountains to the beach, where they lie in the back of the truck, watching the afternoon fog roll in.

It’s 1975 and nobody’s heard of AIDS. Ilka’s on the Pill, so all she has to worry about is that Denny might turn out to be a crazed killer who’ll pull an axe from behind a stack of stereo speakers and chop her into little pieces, which he’ll scatter between San Jose and San Francisco. She knows if she wants to she can kick the axe from his hands and paralyze him with a chop to his Adam’s apple, but still it excites her to imagine cowering before him, especially when they lie wrapped in each other’s arms in the back of the truck on a deserted road in the hills at sunset.

“If there’s a part of me that wants destruction, I can’t be defenseless,” she tells us in Sacred Grounds. “The trouble is, I can defend myself too well. I feel so safe with men it’s a bore.”

“I wouldn’t mind being bored like that,” says Lynne.

When Ilka stops seeing Denny on the road, she’s not too disappointed. Perhaps he quit his job or was fired. Did his boss find the red silk underpants Mika sent her from Japan in an empty turntable box? Did Denny get back together with his old girlfriend? Does he swerve off the road whenever he sees a yellow Volkswagen in the distance?

“He was very immature,” she says, sipping coffee. We’re all kids, nineteen and twenty years old; she’s twenty-nine, so we’re flattered to be included in her maturity.