"What kind of word?"

"I searched. I thought about it. I took it seriously. I was young."

"Love would be a word. But not for you. Too namby-pamby," she said.

"Help would be a word. But even for a weakling, this was a little pitiful. And I thought the problem is the language, I need to change languages, find a word that is pure word, without a lifetime of connotation and shading. And I thought of the Italian word for help because this is what my father used to say when we annoyed him, my brother and I, he'd clasp his hands and wag them and roll his eyes toward heaven and he'd say, Aiuto. The way his own father or grandfather probably did. A word to penetrate the darkness. Aiuto."

"Too many syllables."

"Too many syllables and too comical. Because he did it basically to make us laugh, distract us with laughter. Maybe my father knew twenty words of Italian, I don't know, he was born here, or maybe he spoke the language fairly well, I don't really know. But he did this word. This word was a three-act play the way he did it, drawing it out, croaking like a poisoned duke. Ay-oo-tow And we laughed because on some level he was making fun of the old country and the old mannerisms. A great and profound word but I couldn't use it."

Oddly now she reached down and took my hand and moved it up along the inside of her thigh and placed it sort of cuppingly snug in her crotch, adjusting her posture to get completely comfy, like a child at story time.

"Where's your father now?"

"Dead."

"Where's your brother?"

"I don't know."

She waited for me to continue.

"But I knew I was right to abandon English. And finally I came upon a phrase that seemed alive with naked intent. Alive with something I knew and felt from my own experience. A beautiful spontaneous prayer. Five syllables but so what. Three words and five syllables but I knew I'd found the phrase. It came from another mystic, a Spaniard, John of the Cross, and for that one winter this phrase was my naked edge, my edging into darkness, into the secret of God. And I repeated it, repeated it, repeated it. To Jo y nada."

"Todo y nada."

"Yes. And what does it make you think of? What does it refer to, in your own life? What does it describe?"

"Sex," she said at once. "The best sex. Todo y nada."

"Yes, exactly."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering."

"Don't take it into the open, you're saying. But this is because you're still the same romantic person, probably, you were at twenty. Sex is not so secret anymore. The secret is out. You know what sex means to most people?"

She put her hand down over mine and shifted her pelvis slightly, working into my palm.

"Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself."

She paused and it was true, she looked a little toneless in here, away from the Sundance of poolside light, her face deprived of its unquiet shading, the mica animation that gave her bones a line and edge. All the more interesting, I thought. All the graver, the weightier. I was after real time and an honest reading of the woman.

"And anyway there's all kinds of public sex," she said. "Horny writers write sex scenes."

"Alone. They write them alone. And you read them alone."

"How do we meet people with similar interests?"

"I don't know. Silently, clandestinely."

"Like criminals. But we're not criminals. We want our own conference, with hors d'oeuvres and little napkins. There's too much loneliness in America? Too many secrets? Let them out, open them up. And don't look at me so closely. You're looking too closely."

"How else do I know you?"

"You don't know me. You don't want to know me. We're in the desert here."

"There's another sentence from The Cloud. But I only recall a fragment. About the sharp dart of longing love."

"Sounds porno."

"You're porno and your friends are porno. You have your own magazine, right? Like any business. Like the rock and gravel business and the mortician business. Only you show pubic hair. And home movies through the mail."

Head erect, her mouth pursed in mock self-righteousness.

"This isn't about smut, you know. I'm not a smutty person believe it or not"-she began to laugh a little wildly, her voice cracking-"as I sit here with a strange man's hand on my pussy." And she hip-twisted and moaned oohingly at the friction-moaned in parody but also in earnest.

"I'm not a strange man's hand."

"Don't look at me."

"Who will I look at?"

"I didn't come to this freaking outback to be analyzed."

"You're my relapse. Not the first but the first in a very long time. And that's what makes you unsafe."

"What makes you unsafe?"

"I'm your exception to indiscriminate fucking."

"You think you're discriminate? What makes you discriminate? I don't even remember your name."

I told her my name, first and last, and she said it sounded phony.

"More. I need more," she said. "There you were. Weak and wretched."

"Yes."

"Reading books about God."

"Yes,"

"Talking to priests."

"Yes!"

"So what was your sin? Your secret? The reason for your wretched state?"

She had that original challenge in her eyes but without the know-ingness, the amused and slightly tilted-not disdain but unwillingness to allow the possibility of surprise. This was gone and there was a curiosity that was less sheer and frontal.

I withdrew my hand from her body and sat back and folded my arms across my chest, head tilted, as a sign of resignation, of being abject before a mystery, a young man unstatus'd and base.

"I'd been in correction."

"In correction."

"As we called it. A juvenile correction center. They'd sent me away for a time and when I got out, I went to a small Jesuit outpost in northern Minnesota, where they specialized in hardship kids and others of uncommon qualities."

"And you were in correction?"

"For shooting a man. I shot a man."

"Killed him?"

"Killed him. I was seventeen when it happened and to this day I'm not sure whether the intent was express or implied or howsoever the law reads. Or was it all a desperate accident?"

"And you've thought about this a great deal?"

"I've tried, on and off. I retain the moment. I've tried to break it down, see it clearly in its component parts. But there are so many whirling motives and underlying possibilities and so whats and why nots."

"What does that mean?"

"Well at some point, with my finger already moving the trigger, at some micropoint in the action of the mind and the action of the finger and the trigger-action itself, I may have basically said, So what. I'm not really sure. Or, Why not do it and see what happens."

"Who was the man?"

"Who was the man. He wasn't an enemy or a rival. A sort of friend if anything. A guy who helped me out occasionally, an older guy, not an influence in any way, I don't think, except in the sense that he owned a shotgun."

I had a rash inspiration then, unthinking, and did my mobster voice.

"In udder words I took him off da calendar."

A voice my wife had never heard and a story I'd never told her and how strange this was and how guilty it made me feel. But not right away. Guilt later in Phoenix-save the guilt for the bookwalled rooms and the Turkish prayer rugs and the fashion magazines in the bathroom basket.