I tied the Minotaur's arm to the skewer, held it in front of the lamp, made it go up and down, miming his words. "A dog should not live here," I said, imitating his heavy accent. "Children, yes. But dogs no. No dogs." The Minotaur pointed at him. "What you got against dogs?"

"Play with dolls." He smiled. "Sometimes you are woman, sometimes little girl."

I put the Minotaur in a can with the others, a bouquet of paper demigods and monsters. "Rena's not here. She's out getting loaded with Natalia."

    "Who say I come to see Rena?" Sergei peeled himself away from his doorjamb and came in, casually, just wandering, innocent as a shoplifter. He picked things up and put them down exactly where they had been, and he never made a sound. I couldn't stop watching him. It was as if one of my animal-men had come to hfe, as if I had summoned him. How many times had I thought of just this moment, Sergei come a-calling, like a cat yowling on the back fence for you. I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

Sergei  picked   up   Yvonne's  paperweight  and   shook  it, watched the glitter fall. Out in the living room, the TV was on, Yvonne absorbed in some trendy nighttime drama about hip young people wearing clothes from Fred Segal, with good haircuts and more stylish problems than hers. He stuck a finger in Yvonne's eyeshadow tray, traced some on his eyelids. "What you think?" he smiled, cocking his head, looking at himself, smoothing his blond hair back with one hand, vain as a woman. He watched me in the mirror.

He had wide sleepy eyelids, the silver suited them. He looked like a prince in ballet, but his scent was distinctly animal, he filled the room with his musk. I'd once stolen a T-shirt of his, for just that smell. I wondered if he ever found out.

"Astrid." He sat on the edge of my bed, put his thick rope-veined arm along the back of my headboard. You didn't even hear the springs squeak when he sat. "Why you avoid me?"

I started to cut a mermaid with long, art nouveau hair from the cover of an old Scientific American. "You're her boyfriend. I like living here. Therefore, I avoid you."

That purring cat voice. "Who tells her? Me? You?" he said. "I know you a little, Astrid krasavit[a. Not such good girl. People think, but not what I see."

"What do you see?" I asked. Curious as to what bizarre distortions my image had undergone in the translation within the sewer system of Sergei's mind.

"You see me, you like. I feel you watch but then look away. Maybe afraid you get like her, da?" He jerked his head toward the front of the house, Yvonne, gesturing a big belly. "You don't trust. I never give you baby."

As if that were it. I was afraid, but not of that. I knew if I ever let him touch me, I would not be able to stop. I remembered the day my mother and her friends went to drink at the revolving bar on top of the Bonaventure Hotel, and I was pulled toward the windows, the nothingness was pulling me out. I felt that feeling every time I was in a room with Sergei, that sliding toward a fall.

"Maybe I like Rena," I said, making tiny cuts down the mermaid's tail for scales. "Women don't like it much when you screw around with their lovers."

His smile wiped his face like a mop. "Don't worry Rena." He laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from beneath the neat belt, the tight jeans. "She don't own thing long. She like to trade. Sergei today, somebody tomorrow. Hi, bye, don't forget hat. But for you, something else. Look."

He pulled something out of his shirt pocket. It caught my eye like a firefly. It was a necklace, a diamond on a silvery chain. "I find this lying in street. You want?"

He was trying to buy me off with a stolen necklace? I had to laugh. Found it in the street. In someone's nightstand, more likely. Or around her throat even, how could I know? / take the sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. A child-molester offering you candy, a ride in his car. So this was how someone like Sergei seduced a woman he wanted. Where just his smell and voice and the blue ropes of vein in his arms was enough, those sleepy blue eyes now sparkling under silver lids, that criminal smile.

He pulled a sad face. "Astrid. Beauty girl. This is gift from my heart."

Sergei's heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. If I were a good girl, I would be insulted, I would kick him out. I would ignore his smile, and shape of him inside his jeans. But he knew me. He smelled my desire. I felt myself slipping toward the windows, pulled by thin air.

He hooked the chain around my neck. Then he took my hand and put it on his groin, warm, I could feel him getting hard under my hand. It was obscene, and it excited me to feel him there, a man I wanted like falling. He leaned down and kissed me the way I wanted to be kissed, hard and tasting of last night's booze-up. He unzipped my polyester shirt, pulled it over my head, took my skirt off and threw it onto Yvonne 's bed. His hands waking me up, I'd been sleeping, I hadn't even known it, it had been so long.

Then he stopped, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my scars. Tracing the Morse code of dog bite on my arms and legs with his fingertips, then the bullet scars, shoulder, chest, and hip, measuring their depth with his thumb, calculating their age and severity. "Who does this to you?"

How could I begin to explain who did it to me. I would have to start with the date of my birth. I glanced at the door, still open, we could hear the TV. "Is this an exhibition or what?"

He shut it noiselessly, unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the chair, pulled off his pants. His body white as milk, blue-veined, it was frightening, lean and dense as marble. It took my breath away. How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

He knew how to touch me, knew what I liked. I wasn't surprised. I was a bad girl, lying down for the father again. His mouth on my breasts, his hands over my bottom, up between my legs. There was no poetry about us humping on the yellow chenille bedspread on the floor. He hauled me into the positions he liked, my legs over his shoulders, riding me like a Cossack. Standing up with his arms linked to hold my weight as he thrust into me. I saw us in the closet mirror. I was surprised to see how little I resembled myself, with my lidded eyes, my sexual smile, not Astrid, not Ingrid, nobody I ever saw before, with my big bottom and long legs around him, how long I was, how white.

Dear Astrid,

          A girl from Contemporary Literature came to interview me. She wanted to know all about me. We talked for hours; everything I told her was a lie. We are larger than biography, my darling. If anyone should know this it's you. After all, what is the biography of the spirit? You "were an artist's daughter. You had beauty and wonder, you received genius with your toddler's applesauce, with your goodnight kiss. Then you had plastic Jesus and a middle-aged lover with seven fingers, you were held hostage in turquoise, you were the pampered daughter of a shadow. Now you are on Ripple Street, where you send me pictures of dead men and make bad poems out of my words, you want to know who I am?