I sat in a shadowy corner of her studio while she arranged the braids on her sculpture-in-perpetual-progress.

“You’re a beast,” she said. “Someone to love’s not so bad.”

I said nothing.

“My two best friends oughta get together.”

I raised my eyebrows. Premature declarations of friendship always startled me. I watched her sulk.

Now the braids decorated her waist. Then she had the best idea. She came over and put them in my hair.

“You look sweet. You look just like an Egyptian. Keep ‘em.”

I gave ‘em back.

She dangled them in her arms and pouted, then she draped them around her neck and smiled.

“You might have been such lovers,” she said. “I should’ve planted him in a nightclub, taken you there, and let you pick the beauty for yourself.”

16

I’m the woman with crocodile shoulders, telling Catherine weird bitch’s story. Who knows what a weird bitch will do? I’ll tell you one thing: I’m glad it’s not me she’s after. This is the paradox: How can a woman claim she loves a man and yet try to be the source of his destruction? And why doesn’t the man just get the fuck out? If you ask him he’ll give you a bullshit answer like, “She’s the most fascinating woman in the world.” All the fascinating women in the world could fill the ocean. And as far as I’ve been able to see it takes one fascinating woman and one ticket to ride the train.

17

Catherine wants to go for a walk on the beach, but no one will go with her. She goes alone and comes back filthy with Ibiza sand, her hair wet, tangled, and matted with seaweed and brine.

“The sea witch,” Ernest says.

“You look fucked,” I say.

“What were you doing, dragging the fucking ocean?” he asked.

“Thanks,” Catherine says. “Fuck the two of you too.” She starts out, then turns back. “I almost got myself drowned, you bastards. That young man standing downstairs fished me out.”

Ernest and I rush to her. She backs away from us.

“Is the young man still down there?” Ernest asks, fishing into his pockets for coins. “I want to thank him.”

“He won’t take your fucking money,” she says. “What you can do is go wave to him. Let him know I’m okay.”

“Are you okay?”

She nods.

Ernest goes out on the terrace. We hear his thank-yous, the boy’s de nadas. He comes back inside.

“By the way,” Catherine asks, “how much would I have been worth?”

She struts out, green weed swaying from the back of her wet head.

“You two should have been with me,” she calls. “You two fucking bastards.”

18

Ernest tells me about this woman he’s writing about in this article on psychokinesis. This woman, he says, redirected her frustrations into psychokinetic energies. She could cause things to move, but she could only cause things to move when she was in a room with her husband. She and her husband would be sitting watching TV and suddenly a lamp would fall and break, or the telephone would start to ring and there’d be no one on the other end, or a chair would slide across the floor or spring into the air. Sometimes there would be more destructive things, like windows breaking, or heavy furniture slamming into walls and doors. At first the couple hired ghost breakers and then discovered through a psychic medium that it was the woman herself causing the destructions and it was her only way of expressing her little dissatisfactions. She hadn’t even known she had them. As far as her conscious mind was concerned, theirs was a strong and loving relationship. She loved her marriage and her man.