"Ah well,” Pierce said.

"I'm obliged to say this."

"Ah. Well."

Before Pierce could address the matter, Brother Lewis, one knee clasped in his hands, looked upward, thinking; and he said:

"You could of course go on living with her, but as brother and sister. That would be acceptable. But it might not be easy."

"No,” Pierce said. “Maybe not."

"This is where prayer comes in,” Brother Lewis said.

Pierce made no answer. The sweetness he had at first perceived in Brother Lewis, that stilled fear and revulsion, hadn't ceased flowing, but Pierce wondered if maybe it was coming not from the monk but from himself, the layman. He almost laughed aloud, as though the flow of it outward were ticklish. Brother Lewis put his long strange old hand over Pierce's where it lay.

"You'll be in my prayers,” he said. “Be certain of that."

* * * *

After a certain time, as it was meant to do when it had had no command from him, Pierce's Zenith computer shut its eye and went to sleep. Pierce returning from Brother Lewis's room looked at the blankness of it, not sleepy himself. He regarded his bed, his chair, his open bag not yet and never to be unpacked. A pint of Scotch beneath the extra jammies. His watch told him it was near nine, or Compline. He drank from his bottle, shuddering. Then he took his coat, checked for his keys and wallet, went out into the hall, closing his door softly behind him, not knowing where he would go but unwilling suddenly to sit or lie. All silent; distant sounds of washing up in the refectory. Brother Lewis's door now shut.

The ironbound door to the outside was huge. The night was clear and cold. Orion, though tumbling over slightly now, was still aloft. Pierce saluted him: Hey, big guy. You'll be gone soon. Gone to sleep in the nether waters, while Scorpio rises every night and the year grows, from leaf to flower and flower to fruit. All the same as always.

He got in his car, the number two car; the capacious new wagon had been left for Roo and the kids; this one irremediably filthy, cookie crumbs and worse down in every crevice too deep for any vacuum.

The long drive down the mountain was easy and broad, and completely dark; no habitations but the monks’ for miles. Not until the road leveled and debouched onto a state highway did the world begin again.

And the flesh. And the devil. Pierce taking a left onto the highway came almost immediately on a neon-lit roadhouse: the Paradise Lounge. On its sign a palm tree and a pineapple, a pair of conga drums, and a female figure as iconic as an African sculpture, all breast and behind, but with a cheerful smile and Barbie ponytail. The Paradise Lounge offered Exotic Dancers.

Surely this place hadn't been here at the mountain's foot when he arrived. But surely it looked different in daylight. He turned in, and parked his car in a row of mostly pickups and older sedans, and sat for a moment hearing faint drumbeats and wondering if he actually meant to go in.

He had, always had had, a squeamish and sheltered boy's fear of squalor and affront, and never had liked joining his sexual feelings with those of other men in public places; maybe he didn't like thinking that his were like, even interchangeable with, theirs. So he hadn't often gone into places like this even when he'd lived in the city and they were common.

He went in.

They—places like this—had changed, it seemed, or maybe the country edition or version was different. The Paradise Lounge was a long low room with a bar at one end and a raised platform like a fashion-show runway, around which men sat as at a banquet, with their drinks, looking up, bathed in a pinkish light. He was asked for a five-dollar cover charge by a polite but large man, who then offered him the place with a hand. All yours. Smells of smoke and sweet liquor, or something. On the runway a naked woman moved with a kind of acrobatic lasciviousness to characterless rock. Entirely naked, even to her shoes, which he thought always remained. A silver stud in her navel the only manmade thing upon her. Her pubic hair removed. She seemed very young, and shockingly beautiful, nothing he had expected.

He ordered a beer from another woman, clothed, who approached him, smiling in welcome. For a time he only watched, standing at a narrow counter that ran around the room's perimeter, meant for the shy, it seemed, and now and then lifted the bottle to his lips. A vast emotion filled him that he couldn't identify. He observed that there were precise rules for what went on between customer and girl. She came on her circuit before each of them, but if you put down a bill on the counter for her, she stayed a while longer before you, made her motions for you, as the rest waited; she came close with her nakedness, brought it calculated inches from your face, front and rear; smiling and answering if you spoke, bending over you and offering her breasts like fruit, even draping over you her hair. No one else spoke, and no one, not the object of her attention nor any of the other men, called out any of the coarse exhortations Pierce supposed he might have expected: on some faces there was a beatific grin, on others a perfect sweet mammalian blank. And no one touched. No one—not at this hour on this day anyway—so much as lifted a hand from the brown bottle it held. The rules and the reasons were otherwise. But what were the reasons? Why pay to be offered and at the same time forbidden? No, something different or other than that.

A small dark man in a wool shirt and gimme hat vacated a seat at the runway, and Pierce took it. Now he too looked upward into the body of the woman displayed, or would when she came to him. He took from his wallet a wrinkled bill—how much? It seemed, strangely, that a single would do; it was all that others had put down.

Edenic. Maybe what he felt was awe. It was so shameless as to precede shame, to precede Eros even, like playing doctor, which the bare pubes also suggested. Show me yours. He and all of them swallowing down the sight of her so utterly offered. Pierce's brain, spinning along somewhat independently of his full soul, tried to think of that word, a vowel-less Sanskrit word, that Barr in one of his books said meant the entirety of nature, expressed in the revelation of female nakedness to awestruck males.

The eye is the mouth of the heart. What they were all shown here wasn't temptation followed by privation; no. What they saw fed them, he just didn't know how.

Here she was before him, his turn.

"How are you?” he asked.

"I'm real good,” she said gently. “I want to know how you are."

"I'm forty-nine years old,” he said, astonishing himself.

"Well. You thinking of quitting?"

She turned before him, squatting and extending gracefully. It was possible to study, in her actuality, those soft spreadings and minute tremblings that were absent from the glossy near-naked women whose images were ubiquitous now on television and in magazines, their flesh honed, machined, like something put on over flesh rather than flesh itself. Smoothed with unguents and depilated this body was, but there was no denying (why would he be tempted to deny?) that this was flesh.

"I do,” he said. “Sometimes I do."

"Betcha you won't,” she said, turning. “Not for years yet."

Her hair fell over him, odorous and fine. Her dark eyes on his, most unashamed of all. He felt a wave of gratitude and immense privilege, like great good luck. “You're so nice,” he said. No tax on asininity here.

"I'm not nice,” she said. “I'm bad."

"No,” he said. “Nice."

She gazed at him from beneath her black brows, and, smiling, shook her head minutely, what's to be done with this guy; meanwhile she had begun to move away from him, his meter on empty.