What went through my head as she came down the stairs! That she must have taken the last of her cocaine. How pale, how deathly pale her body looked aside her sun-tanned face, neck and arms. How weary it was, with its tired breasts, the tired skin around her belly, and yet how beautiful. That weary beauty was still beauty. What the kids in the Art Gallery had thought about her hips, thighs and feet, and how wrong it was. What I had projected onto her: softness and seduction, resistance and refusal, and that in the end she was just a woman with a life of her own. How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine. That she had shown the children she’d taken in more love than I had shown mine. That her body’s weariness moved me. How close that feeling was to desire.

She spoke with her eyes. She was playing a role for me, but not performing. She wasn’t the young Irene, we both knew, but was old – as I was old. That at this point, she had little left to offer but love. That she was inviting me to also offer just that, and to acknowledge that that was what I wanted. But that she also enjoyed the game, the self-reference, and my admiring gaze.

Then she came down and gave her entire body to our embrace, chest to chest, belly to belly, thighs to thighs. My hands felt her skin; she was like silk paper, soft, dry, fragile. I knew that I would soon carry her to her room. But there was no hurry.

14

The next day, I made a double bed in her room from two singles, and pushed our mattresses together on the balcony. I was hesitant to share a bed with Irene on the balcony, where Kari might appear at any moment. But she shook her head. “He only comes when he thinks I might be in danger. If a helicopter appears, or a boat, any strangers.”

Never again was Irene so lively as the evening when she took her last cocaine. We never made love again either; she was too weak, and she was happy when we held each other. Something else changed. She kept wanting me to tell her stories, but after our night together, she wanted to hear something different. “Would you tell me how it might have gone if we had met as students?”

“How could we have met as students? You were political, you had admirers, you were invited to parties and openings, you got married early – all I did was go to lectures and seminars and sit in the library.”

“But now you know you could have met me…Didn’t you ever go to the Cave?”

“No.”

“But you knew about it? And where it was?”