Are you joking? I say.

But she just smiles at me. If I were her shrink, I would probably say it has to do with power. I would speculate that she was anorexic as a girl. I would root around in her skull for some barely remembered incident of childhood fondling or worse. But I’m not her shrink and wouldn’t want to be. I would rather eat my own eyeballs with a spoon than wiggle around in that head for money. As for birth control, well. Jude told me a few nights ago, in bed at the King James, that she doesn’t bother about birth control anymore because she had her tubes tangled sometime after the unwanted pregnancy in New Orleans.

Ten minutes later we sit on the black-and-white floor. The air is white with mist and we pass a damp cigarette back and forth. I’ve put my borrowed pants back on and Jude has wrapped herself in a massive blue towel. She’s wrapped in a chunk of sky and only her feet poke out. Her feet are beautiful, but not so pretty as Molly’s. I shut my eyes. I have a sudden urge to grind the cigarette out on my arm.

What are we doing here? I say.

Jude blows smoke at me. Don’t, she says.

What?

Don’t think about it so much. And don’t try to suck me into some philosophical debate.

Okay.

Brief silence while I wonder who is going to die.

What shall I think about?

Jude shrugs. The sleeping arrangements, she says.

What about them?

You’re sleeping with Molly tonight.

Jude is not kidding, it seems. She gives me that look of stone and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. She lets the blue towel fall to the floor and stands there a minute, naked and foreboding. Now she gives her hair a shake. The water flies from her in tiny rays of broken light.

You’re kidding, I say.

I’m not kidding.

Jesus.

What’s the problem, she says. You want her, don’t you?

Maybe. But I might rather make that choice on my own.

Jude shrugs. I don’t see how it makes a difference.

And where are you sleeping?

Wherever I want to, she says. With menace.

With Miller, you mean.

I have to get into character, she says. We both do.

Give me a fucking break, Jude.

Listen, she says. We are shooting this goddamn movie with Miller. When it’s done, he will bring Cody to me. Until then, we cooperate.

I watch as she takes a robe from the back of the door, a man’s robe. Black with green checks. She pulls it tight around her and she doesn’t look like any of this bothers her much.

And this doesn’t bother you? I say.

Weren’t you listening? says Jude. Monogamy is hopelessly antiquated. And therefore defunct.

You want me to sleep with her.

Jude stares, never flinching. Yes. Tonight, I want you to sleep with Molly.

I just nod. All right, I say. Anything for you, baby.

I walk down a hallway of muted yellow light. Molly is waiting for me behind door number three and I feel flushed, nervous. Like I’m on a blind date. And Jude is right, sort of. Monogamy is defunct, an antiquated concept that never held much water. I had tried to educate myself while I wandered the desert, chasing Jude’s shadow, and one of the books I slogged through was Darwin’s The Origin of Species, or one of its sequels. I wouldn’t call it a page-turner but one thing was pretty clear: Darwin was a maniacal old fucker half-addled by cocaine but the man was no dummy and he wouldn’t have bet a nickel on monogamy hanging around as long as it has.

Monogamy doesn’t work unless it rises up from the bones. Because it promises nothing but fear and tension when forced on you. It fills you up with despair where there might be joy. It shoves guilt and paranoia and self-loathing down your throat, if you don’t truly want it. Jude and I were monogamous when we were together, for the most part. And monogamy was a fucking drag. It seemed like a social obligation, an arbitrary puritanical construct, and after a while we started lying to each other. When I was with Jude, I pretended to know what I wanted, and with a hellish quickness my face became a jackal’s mask. Then I took a bubble bath one night and a gang of psychos ruined her face before we figured the shit out.

I used to watch her sometimes, when she was painting her toenails or brushing her teeth or yawning on the floor in her underwear, flicking through a glossy woman’s magazine. I loved her. I didn’t love her. Once, I watched her take the television apart in the middle of the night because she was bored. I watched her reduce the television to a scrap heap of apparently ruined fuses and wires. Then I watched her put the television back together and was not surprised when the reception was improved. I thought I loved her, then. I watched her smash the same television to bits two days later because she didn’t like some snotty actress and in that moment, I thought I loved her. But there was fear between us, truly. There is always fear but when two artists, two liars, or two killers occupy the same house and sleep in the same bed, rage runs rampant and becomes entangled with mistrust and doubt and alcoholic despair. The love between them isn’t safe in the bones, the marrow.

Jude doesn’t belong to me and never did. I don’t belong to her because our love is unsafe in the marrow.

Therefore, Jude and I are each set free with the flickering hope that we may come back to each other and the knowledge that we may not. And in the meantime we may as well fuck other people and we may as well be casual and nihilistic about it. It doesn’t mean anything because we don’t belong to each other, at least, not now. One day, though. One day. I might just come around a corner and stumble into the version of Jude that I belong to. And when I find her, I just hope I have the good sense to give myself to her.

This is the moment when the blood throttles up to eleven and everything else slows down. The air around me glimmers and I can see the world a little too clearly. I can see the imperfections in the wood and brick and I can see the fine threads in the carpet under my feet. I can hear Miller breathing downstairs. I imagine Jude tying him up, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. The door at the end of the hall is a little black square that from six seven eight feet away looks much too small for me to pass through. It’s just large enough for a little British girl or a fat white rabbit and I love it when pop culture bleeds through to the cellular level. The endless memories that are not my own.

I stop at the door and listen.

She’s got a razor sadness about her, nothing a hundred dollars won’t fix. Tom Waits is playing softly in Molly’s room. Rain Dogs. Bob Frost is a good egg. This is encouraging, I think. Any woman who likes Tom Waits is bound to have sweetness in her heart. I open the door without knocking. Molly sits cross-legged on the bed, her hair hangs yellow and loose. The room is softly lit and eerily windowless. There’s a green armchair in one corner. The red walls are lined with bookshelves. Two silver curtains shaped like angel’s wings hang over a doorway opposite. The bed is small and puffy, with an iron frame. I’m sure it would make a hellish commotion during even the most careful sexual activity.

Molly’s feet are still bare. Hello, she says.

This is awkward and I wait for her to say Can I help you? But she smiles and shrugs slightly and I take it that she is expecting me.

This is awkward, I say.

No, she says. I like you. And we don’t have to do anything.

Oh. Thank god.

But you have to be nice to me.

I stare at her. It’s not a request I’m used to hearing.

Molly picks up a book and curls into a pool of lamplight. The bathroom is there, through the curtains, she says. If you want to brush your teeth.

Thanks. Do you mind if I smoke in here?

Molly shrugs and I sit down on the end of the bed. I dig out matches.

By the green chair, she says. There’s an ashtray.