She opened the packet and let the contents, half the contents, spill onto the aluminum sheet. It was a resinous substance, chunked up, nubbed up. She told Brian to sit on the bed and pick up the sheet and hold it straight, hold it by the edges so the stuff, the tarlike chunks, didn't run off the ends.

"What the hell is it? And how can it run off if it's solid?"

Then she went into the handbag again and took a small rolled-up straw of some kind, a foil straw a few inches long.

"Yo, Marian, what are we doing here?"

Then she reached for her matches and lit one and held it under the aluminum sheet in Brian's hands, heating the substance on the sheet.

"It's heroin," she said, watching the tar slowly begin to liquefy.

"It's heroin," he said. "What am I supposed to say to that?"

When the tar started evaporating and smoking up, she shook out the match and put the foil straw in her mouth and trailed the curling smoke, sucking it up and holding it in her lungs, conscientiously.

"Okay. Where'd you get it?"

She watched the tar melt and run and evaporate and she followed the smoke off the stretched foil and sucked it through the straw.

"Mary Catherine."

"Who's that?"

"My assistant."

"Whose bed we're on? Your secretary's your dealer? When did you start doing this?"

"I never actually thought of her."

She trailed the smoke off the sheet and put her head right into it and sucked it through the straw.

"I never thought of her as my dealer but I guess she's my dealer and I'm her whatever."

"This is something new?"

"Fairly new yes. Here, take a chase."

"No, thanks."

She trailed the smoke into the air.

"I'm, you know, completely prudent. I use it rare, rare, rare. I don't get out of bed puffy-eyed, or pain, or nausea. Take a chase."

She sucked up the smoke.

"Nick knows this? He can't know this."

"Are you crazy? He'd kill me/Take a chase."

"Get the hell away from me."

"I want to get you in deeper. Take a chase. I want to get you in so deep you'll stop eating and sleeping. You'll lie in bed thinking about us. Doing our things in a borrowed room. You'll be able to think about nothing else. That's my program for you, Brian."

"Mary Catherine. I like the name," he said. "Sexy."

They sat on the bed, side by side, listening to traffic roll by on Thomas Road. When she was finished they cleared the things away and brushed off the bed and lay back talking.

"I think he knows," she said.

"Where is he?"

"On his way to Houston or there already. Then he drives out to that nuclear waste site wherever it is exactly."

"The salt dome."

"At the mercy of the Texas Highway Killer."

"He doesn't know," Brian said. "But we ought to think about ending it. We ought to make this the end."

"I'm not nearly ready. So just keep quiet. You're making me feel like some old dowd barely hanging on."

"You're not a dowd. You're a bawd."

"Be nice to me," she said.

The day had slipped down to a drowsy pulse located somewhere near her eyes. When she stretched she felt the jismic crust in her pubic hair speck out and crackle slightly.

He whispered, "Let's have a civilized final fuck and get out alive."

She listened to the traffic and wondered what she would say in the movie version.

He whispered, "Let's fuck the sayonara fuck and get into our suits and dresses."

She smiled faintly. The air had the feel of some auspicious design. She was feeling faintly L.A.ish and she rolled over on Brian and talked while they were doing it, on and off, sweetness, dearness, blowing the words, sensing an unseen design of completely auspicious things.

When they were side by side he raised up on an elbow and looked at her

"You have that molten ball of defiance in your eye."

"Just don't talk about ending. It's not yours to end."

He laughed. When Brian laughed he became semitransparent. You could see blood racing under his skin, a freshet of rose pink. He got up and began to dress. He picked up a fashion magazine and held it open to a looming photo of some casually muscled bisexual, maybe a white guy, maybe not-dangled it over the bed as if to indicate how dated he was in his own body, his very life, Brian himself, a man without a fitness video to sling in the oblong groove.

"Underwear. Everything, suddenly, is underwear," he said. "Tell me what it means."

He checked the time and got a little panicky. She attempted to help, handing items of apparel across the bed, and he fumbled things intentionally, he wore a sock inside out and tied his shoes together so he could scuttle and lurch to the door. The later it got, the more he capered. It was Brian at his best.

"But what if he knows?"

"He doesn't know," she said.

She had a demon husband if demon means a force of some kind, an attendant spirit of discipline and self-command, the little flick of distance he'd perfected, like turning off a radio. She knew about his father's disappearance but there was something else, hard and apart. This is what had drawn her in the first place, the risky and erotic proposition.

Brian was looking at the photographs on the wall by the door.

"Which one is her?"

"Get out," she said.

She made the bed and bagged the dope and put the robe back in the closet. She washed the glass Brian had used, standing naked in the kitchenette, and it seemed completely reasonable and natural, all of it, earned, needed, naked, and she took a shower and got dressed.

She was feeling pretty good. She felt lazy-daisy, you know. You know the way something's been nagging and dragging and then it gets unexpectedly sort of settled.

She felt all the good things would find her, which they usually don't. She would know them when she saw them with her L.A.-type eyes.

She stood before the mirror adjusting her sunglasses. Because if she didn't have this thing to do, to plan and maneuver and look forward to, this far-too-infrequent Brian, and this is what she'd almost told him earlier, she would become lonely and shaky, driving along the decorated highway under the burning sky, and maybe a little indistinct.

She felt well liked. She liked who she was today. She felt a little lazy-souled. She thought anything L.A. seemed right today. She'd even say she was more or less euphoric, although she wasn't ready to commit to that completely.

Before she left she inspected the room one last time. These were the things that opened the world to secret arrangements, the borrowed flat and memorized phone number and coded notation on the calendar. Childish spy games really that made her feel guiltier than the sex did, a sheepish kind of self-reproach. She patted down a pillow to remove the indentation. She wanted things to have an untouched look so Mary Catherine would not mind when she asked to use the place again.