“I must be a monstrosity.”

“A monstrosity? You’re a handsome fellow. You talk about the women’s surprise and fear. You’ve been surprised and afraid of yourself.”

“I know my mother told you about the healing nonsense. I did try one thing since giving it up. When this happened, I tried to heal myself.”

“But you couldn’t.”

“No.”

“So since you can’t heal yourself, you’re really set on not healing others.”

“It’s a lot of what you Americans call baloney. It has nothing to do with the world today, with its lasers and men on the moon.”

I rubbed Vaseline on my knees, then I gathered up my legs in a lotus posture.

“Some ignorant belief.”

“If belief works, it can’t be ignorant. At least that’s how I figure it.”

“Like all you Americans.”

“What?”

“Your great philosophy, your only philosophy, you offer to the world: what works is good.”

“What works can’t be bad. Maybe what works isn’t the only good, but how else can you judge good.”

“There ought to be another way,” he said. He leaned back onto his black elbows. The insides of his arms were ashy. I dabbed on the Vaseline and rubbed.

“Well, for instance,” he said, “the Mona Lisa doesn’t work and she’s good.”

He was arguing it, but now it was a different kind of work. But maybe there was only one kind of work.

“I don’t know about the Mona Lisa.”

He looked at me sideways. “What?”

“I think the bitch works. Sure the bitch works.”

“What do you mean?” He was frowning, wary.

“All the gawkers. You were working, weren’t you? You were working like hell.”

He shrugged his shoulders, leaned back, and watched the gawkers. I’m sure they couldn’t tell if he was smiling or sneering, because I couldn’t.

“Anyway,” I said as we gathered up the towels and lotions and headed back. “Anyway, this bitch worked.”

“What do you mean? And incidentally, I don’t like that word for a woman.”

“Incidentally, I don’t either.”

“Then why do you use it?”

“Because I’ve heard it too much.”

“Anyway, go on,” he said. “Explain.”

“I mean after they got through looking at you, they’d look at me and wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“What sort of woman I was.”

“To be with me?”

“Yeah, that, and . . . like maybe I was hiding something too, maybe even more amazing.”

“What could you be hiding? You looked pretty much to me like you were showing it all.”

“Even you haven’t seen it all, buddy.”

“Then show me.”

“That’s the other ‘American philosophy,’ ” I said.

He waited. He said later I was full of gag lines. And the gag line, he said, was another American characteristic. According to him, I was just chock-full of these little American characteristics, like a bonbon full of hazelnuts. And America, from the point of view of the Latins, was the greatest gag line of them all.

“You noticed how the Americans were gawking the hardest,” I said.