Now, as she sat across from him wearing his chunky sweater and with her spoon in her mouth, he felt that the miracle of that afternoon, which had finally succeeded in neutralizing the persistent, agonizing desire of the past year, was well and truly over. The imagined sight of him throwing her down, rough enough to make all the people in the restaurant scream if they could see it, descended in front of her moving lips like a semi-transparent veil, an all-too-familiar hellish projection flickering in front of his eyes. He looked down at the table and awkwardly swallowed a mouthful of rice.

“Why is it you don’t eat meat? I’ve always wondered, but somehow I couldn’t ask.” She lowered her chopsticks and looked across at him. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s difficult for you,” he said, fighting all the time to suppress the sexual images that were running through his head.

“No,” she said calmly. “It isn’t difficult. It’s just that I don’t think you’d understand.” She raised her chopsticks again and slowly chewed some seasoned bean sprouts. “It’s because of a dream I had.”

“A dream?” he repeated.

“I had a dream…and that’s why I don’t eat meat.”

“Well…what kind of dream?”

“I dreamed of a face.”

“A face?”

Seeing how utterly baffled he was, she laughed quietly. A melancholic laugh. “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t understand?”

He couldn’t ask: in that case, why did you use to bare your breasts to the sunlight, like some kind of mutant animal that had evolved to be able to photosynthesize? Was that because of a dream too?

—

He parked the car in front of her building, and they both got out.

“Thank you so much for today.”

She smiled in response. Her smile was quiet and thoughtful, not dissimilar to that of his wife. For all the world as though she were a perfectly ordinary woman. It’s true, he thought, she really is ordinary. It’s me who’s the crazy one.

She went in through the main door to the building, vanishing without bowing good-bye. He stood there and waited for the lights to come on in her room, then, when her window still hadn’t lit up, got back in the car and started the engine. In his mind he sketched her darkened room, and her sliding her naked body, still covered with the brilliant flowers, between the mattress and the quilt. That body which he had spent so many hours close beside, yet which he had touched only with the tip of his brush.

He ached.

—