“That impossible woman,” she whispers. Then louder, “I’ve got to go pee. Let me up.”

Rebuttoning his sleeve, Ernest stands. Catherine slides out of the booth and heads toward the toilet. I go with her. That’s the policy. Once when they were in some public place, Catherine had gone to the bathroom, discovered this sliver that had broken off the top of the commode, hid it like a dagger in her coat. Well, you know the rest.

I stand inside the door puffing on a cigarette.

“You know what this is like,” Catherine says, her pee sounding like a faucet gushing.

“What?”

“Well, you get here and let me stand up there all self-contained and that La Gioconda smile and you’d know what the fuck it was like.”

“Stop talking dirty.”

“Words to live by,” she says. The pee trickles, then stops.

She’s one of those who wipe from behind. She farts.

There’s the clearing of a throat in the booth next door.

“Howdy, neighbor,” shouts Catherine. Her teeth flash Bugs Bunny and she knocks on the wall.

The woman flushes. There’s a hurried assembling of garments.

“Surf’s up,” calls Catherine.

As there’s the sound of the woman’s door opening, Catherine pushes me aside, pikes her head out the door, and shouts, “Here’s Johnny!”

The startled woman flees.

“She probably thinks we’re crazy,” says Catherine, pulling up her drawers.

23

On the island of Ibiza, I see two old women whipping each other with tree branches. I ask them, “Why are you whipping each other?”

They answer, “For errors we made when we were young women like you.”

When Catherine and I are two old women, will we take up branches, too, whip each other, and complain of errors we’ve made?

I hope not. I hope we’ll hug each other instead.

In the meantime, I turn from the “donkey path” and hunt a beach.

24

Catherine sits with a yellow towel under her; I sit on a blue one. We absorb the sun. I rub coconut oil onto my knees and shoulders, and into the flakes of crocodile skin.

“I want a daughter,” Catherine says.

I think of the TV faces.

“Why don’t you have a daughter for me? You and Ernest? I’d love her like my own. She would be my own. She’d be our own.”

She touches my stomach lightly.

“We’d love her so much!”

“I’m too old,” I say. I cannot bring myself to tell her the truth of it.

“Women have children into their forties,” says Catherine. “I know a woman who had a child at fifty-five. Some places in Russia . . .”

“Why don’t you have your own daughter?

“He wanted to in the beginning when we were first married, but I wanted to put it off, because of my work, and then when I was ready I couldn’t.”

“That’s a pity,” I say.

“So you see you have to do this. We’ll bring her up in our postcard places.” He’d told her. When? Making love?