But she discounts the conversation of Eros which seems to her to be learned not from life, but from films or trashy novels whose authors have in turn learned it from other secondary and substandard sources. Where bodies collide most gloriously, language melts—who said that? Someone or other. Barbara imagines that listening at the bedroom keyholes of even the most richly articulate would be to hear only the murmurous inanities of True Romance. (“I adore your golden breasts,” he whispered gruffly. “You give me intense pleasure,” she deeply sighed.) But these conversations actually take place. She knows they do. The words are pronounced. The sighing and whispering happen. Just the two of us, this paradise.

“We can break in the car,” Peter said to her back in Toronto, “and have a few days together, just the two of us.”

Very late on Day Five they leave the Interstate and strike off on a narrow asphalt road in search of a motel. The cessation of highway noise is stunningly sudden, like swimming away in a dream from the noises of one’s own body. Peter holds his head to one side, judging the car’s performance, the motor’s renewed, slower throb and the faint adhesive tick of the tires rolling on the hot road.

The towns they pass through are poor, but have seen better days. Sidewalks leading up to lovely old houses have crumbled along their edges, and the houses themselves have begun to deteriorate; many are for sale; dark shaggy cottonwoods bend down their branches to meet the graceful pitch of the roofs. Everywhere in these little towns there are boarded-up railway stations, high schools, laundries, cafés, plumbing supply stores, filling stations. And almost everywhere, it seems, the commercial center has shrunk to a single, blinking, all-purpose, twenty-four-hour outlet at the end of town—pathetically, but precisely named: the Mini-Mart, the Superette, the Quik-Stop. These new buildings are of single-story slab construction in pale brick or cement block, and are minimally landscaped. One or two gas pumps sit out in front, and above them is a sign, most often homemade, saying MILK ICE BREAD BEER.

“Milk ice bread beer,” murmurs the exhausted Barbara, giving the phrase a heaving tune. She is diverted by the thought of these four purposeful commodities traded to a diminished and deprived public. “The four elements.”

In the very next town, up and down over a series of dark hills, they find a subtly altered version: BEER ICE BREAD MILK. “Priorities,” says Peter, reading the sign aloud, making an ironic chant of it.

Further along the road they come upon BREAD BEER MILK ICE. Later still, the rescrambled BEER MILK ICE BREAD.