“You’re the rigid one.”

He played his hole card. “Those spots are full of insects. The Americans don’t mind them.”

She blinked. “If I was alone in as exotic a place as this you can be sure I’d go to all sorts of these spots.”

“The motorbike dances …”

She scoffed. “Clumsy. Those are for tourists.”

He began to notice his anger. He had spent a good deal of money to bring her along on this business trip. He had left her behind so often before. Lately his conscience had begun to bother him about it. Decades before, their marriage had been the central fact in his life, a fulfillment. Those feelings had ebbed away. He had gotten caught up in the raw competitive world of men. And he had relished that sense of rasping conflict, of heady victories after strenuous effort.

Still, he felt a duty to her. But traveling with a woman you don’t love was proving worse than living with her.

He finished his drink and slammed the glass down on the marble tabletop. “My,” she said archly.

He stood up. His chair scraped harshly and a waiter, startled, came quickly. Robert waved the man away. “All right,” he said loudly. “I’ll find something. Your kind of place.” He spat out the last word.

Robert left the ornamented hotel and walked down Ashby. He was feeling warm from the meal or from the anger and he moved quickly. He did not noticed the thin man who came up alongside him and said in an oily way, “Something?”

Robert stopped. “I’ve got my own woman,” was all he could immediately think to say.

“An appetizer, then?”

“What?”

“A boy?”

Strong, confusing emotions swept through him. He pushed the man aside and made a rough, incoherent noise.

He walked away swiftly, his steps bringing a harsh slap from the damp paving stones. He went two blocks without seeing the neon jumble around him or noting the sleazy shops.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw the same gaunt man, this time standing at a safe distance. There was a look of bland, wise confidence on the man’s face.

“Senso?” he asked.

Robert paused and was surprised to find he had no anger left. The walking had leached it from him.

“How much?”

With the taxi and the thin man as guide it came to over a thousand yen. Robert knew the man had hiked the price over the usual street value, from the look on his face, but that did not matter. This would provide a simple way to stop Helen’s prattle about “places” and it might even be enjoyable. Better than the real thing had been for quite a long while, at least. He turned back to fetch Helen.

The three of them took a route north into Richmond, over a slimy canal crusted with salt from the deadlands to the north. The taxi wheezed through twisting streets and stopped outside a sprawling bungalow with dim orange lights outside. “Perfectly ghastly,” Robert muttered to himself, but Helen did not reply.

They went up creaking wooden stairs and beneath a punctured solar heating panel that had slid halfway off the roof. “Is this a commercial one?” Helen asked and reached for his arm.

“Of course not,” he said stiffly, pulling away from her. “It’s illegal here.”

They clumped across linoleum floors and through two empty rooms. The guide slipped a key into a door-plate and a wall swung free. This let them into a red-lit room with two glossy, molded chairs perched among a tangle of electronics. A bored-looking attendant stood up from a couch where he had been watching a 3-D. He helped the two of them into the chairs. The equipment looked reasonably new. It had the comfortable cerebral lead-ins Robert had seen in the European advertisements. His opinion of the place rose. Helen made a fuss about getting the attachments settled at her neck and wrists and then quieted down for the first run.

The first was a warm-up, an erotic hors d’oeuvre. A middle-aged man met a younger woman in a restaurant. After a few perfunctory bits of social back-and-forth, they went to her apartment. The senso consisted of extensive foreplay and some fantasizing, though the graphic parts were convincing and strong. He felt the languid satin rub of the woman’s skin, the delicious pull of young muscles, the musky smell, a red lust building in the young man. Robert liked the piece overall, though the woman’s hairdo reminded him of someone he knew and that rather spoiled the associations for him. He guessed that their guide had picked this particular one because the man rather resembled himself, and using a younger woman would cater to the self-images of both parties. He smiled at the calculation.

When it was over be found himself panting slightly and said, “Adequate,” as though he were experienced at this.

“And that’s all? Not very—”

“No, no, the entrée comes next.”

It started. The scene was an old-fashioned street at dusk. A man approached a woman waiting for a bus. The woman wore rather pretty clothes and a head ornament, three decades out of date, which shadowed her face. There was little conversation. Much was conveyed by the man’s swagger, the woman’s jutting hip, a sultry exchange of glances. In the wan traces of sunset their faces were shrouded and a streetlamp caught only suggestive nuances of their expressions, setting a tone of gathering erotic energy.

She responded to a tilt of his head and a murmured invitation. Robert enjoyed this sultry, casual courting, liked the feel of a slim, muscled body. The man had a fine-honed tension running through him, that tightness and pressure which ebbs with age.

They walked a short distance to his apartment. It was atmospheric and suited to the swarthy, intimidating manner of the man. He undressed first, revealing a barrel chest and bushy, black body hair. The arrangement of the lighting cast the woman in a mysterious way as she reclined. There was a hovering excitement in her manner.

The man looked in a full-length mirror nearby. This was to establish identification with the character, but seeing the face full on brought a sudden jolt of recognition to Robert. The hooded look of the man, that frayed lounge in the corner, a familiar French watercolor near the mirror—

The man began some foreplay between the woman’s legs and the humid feel of the bed came through to Robert as he struggled with memories.

My. The thought from Susan, overriding the senso input, startled him. The man was having his effect.

Too raw for me, he thought strongly, hoping to get through the rush of sensation that he could feel between them. I’d like to break it off.

The man moved adroitly with practiced skill. Yes, Robert thought to himself, it was skill, technique. Mere technique. At the time he had thought it was a passion as full and new as the woman’s. He had not allowed for the fact that the barrel-chested man was six years older than she, and far more sophisticated.

No. I want to stay. Concentrate. It might help you, she finished dryly.

I really think—

No. If you break off the thing stops, doesn’t it? And I want to go on.

Robert knew he could rip the connections away, end this now. He reached for the leads, seized one, and stopped. Something in him wanted this to happen. Old memories stirred.

The man embraced the languid woman and his hands moved expertly over her. The woman—a girl, really—rolled to the side at his command. Her movements had a fresh quality to them despite the artificial situation. To fix Helen’s role identification, she looked at herself in the mirror.

He felt Helen’s quick flash of surprise.

It’s—she’s—you!

Was me. Over thirty years ago. The girl stroked the dark, muscular body and Robert caught the tremor of excitement that leaped in Manuel, the man.

But I—you never told me—all these—

I met you long after.

The face, your face—even with the age, and the changes, I can see it is you.