Palisades Passeggiata

Chapter 10 – Palisades Passeggiata

Giambone found some temporary work and for a short period he and Delilah both had jobs in Santa Monica. He was hired by a friend who ran a photo studio on Lincoln Boulevard. The owner specialized in shots of bodybuilders, men and women who competed internationally and whose photos were sold to the assorted beef ‘n’ grunt rags flooding the market. Giambone set up props and lighting, made coffee, swept the floors, and generally attended to the needs of the models. He helped with their hair and makeup, applied oil to their bodies to better reflect the light, and generally kept them amused with his banter while they waited for the photographer to set up his shots. He was paid $15 an hour under the table. He had done the work before. The assignments lasted four to five weeks at most and then dried up for months. It was easy money and his boss let him drink beers on the job. The photographer knew he could find a better assistant, one who didn’t talk so much and needed less direction. But the models loved Giambone and his non-stop chatter. And the fact that he was the brother of Jack gave the photographer’s business a little panache with both the models and the magazines.

Delilah’s job was in leafy Rustic Canyon, close by the Riviera Country Club. She visited a client there once a week in the late afternoon. The man was a retired engineer in his late seventies. He’d made millions by securing the first patent on the Steadicam, which had since become indispensable on movie sets everywhere. The engineer was divorced and recuperating from a heart attack. He hired Delilah ostensibly to monitor and coach him on his treadmill and stationary cycle, both which lay on an enormous terraced patio cut into a steep hillside with a granite spill pool with a money view of the Pacific. It was apparent after the first session that the man’s real interest was watching Delilah stretch and bend in the spandex body suit she wore over nude tights. By their third meeting he had raised her fee to $200 an hour. The increased pay came with a new job description. It required her to stretch, run in place, and progressively discard all her workout clothes until she was entirely naked except for her white ankle socks and sneakers. With a fine film of perspiration clinging to her skin, she was asked to stand on the patio deck facing the ocean. With her back to the client she spread her legs as widely as possible and touched her nose to her knee. Being quite limber, Delilah accomplished the pose easily. Beyond this, the old inventor asked only one other thing. As he was about to ejaculate, Delilah was instructed to say, “Into the bucket, Daddy, into the bucket.” On cue, the geezer tottered over, stood facing her and spent himself on the palms of her hands. These she had tenderly cupped together as though she were catching rainwater spilling lightly from a cedar barrel. Afterwards, Mr. Steadicam always apologized. As a form of self-rebuke, he beseeched her to draw her moistened hands down the sides of his face. She didn’t mind. Despite his age he was not unattractive. And his cheeks were clean-shaven, tan, and moderately smooth. The routine never altered from week to week. It was in many ways the easiest money she made, but she knew it wouldn’t last. Men with money grow tired of their toys. Of course, she never told Giambone.

For the short time that Giambone’s job lasted, he and Delilah met every Tuesday for dinner at a restaurant, right after her session with the inventor. They usually dined at Il Fornaio on Ocean Avenue, or sometimes next door at The Ivy, even though he thought it was too pricey. Giambone liked to order a good bottle of Chianti and a thick steak; Delilah a green salad and a plate of pasta. Il Fornaio was usually loud, but lively and a good place to watch people. And Delilah loved the spectacle Giambone made savoring his cut of beef, something he rarely ate at home. He went at the meat with the brutish sensuality of a Sicilian paterfamilias, a role he liked to assume whenever he was in a room full of people and he could possibly be the object of attention.

After espressos they usually made the passeggiata from the Pier to San Vicente and back again, through the tidy little park that overlooked the ocean from the cliffs of the Palisades. They strolled along the pathway that wound past tall, elegant Canary Island palms and gardens of sage, agapanthus and rosemary. They were happy and drowsy, replete with sweet fragrances lifted up and scattered lightly around them by the breeze as it came off the dark void of cradled water in Santa Monica Bay.

One Tuesday Giambone called Delilah from the studio and asked her to skip the restaurant. He wanted to meet her in the park instead. Even then, when it was still new between them, she could tell something was bothering him, if only because he was willing to miss a meal. But he satisfied her with no ready explanation.

They met in the park near the city’s eponymous statue, a WPA commissioned phallic carving more resembling a sleek stone bomb than the mother of Augustine of Hippo.

“What’s the matter, Pushkin? Not hungry tonight?”

Delilah tried to sound conciliatory. She could tell by the way Giambone averted his eyes that he was either angry or upset with her.

“Let’s just walk,” he said.

They headed north along the path. He felt more under control in public. He trusted himself to avoid outdoors the kind of real pitched battle to which he might succumb in the privacy of their home. If he felt himself losing his grip, he could look at the black blankness of the ocean to assure him that everything was transitory. The ocean reminded him of death, the loss of memory. It nurtured protean cycles of birth and death, just like the fluids in his body. It made him feel small, and as if justice were an imaginary concept with no purposeful application.

They walked in silence a few moments.

“I got Fishbein to a level 3 on the treadmill today,” she said, not sure what else to talk about. “He did a moderate climb of a hundred meters in four minutes. He was so winded I thought I might kill the old fart.”

She laughed. She always laughed at her own jokes. She hated the sound of it as it drifted above them. It sounded pathetic when he didn’t join in her laughter, leaving her to dangle exposed. She persisted.

“I ought to work him harder. The more he’s out of breath, the less he has to say about the size of some woman’s tits.”

This irritated him more, although he could tell she said it deliberately, to show him that she held her client in contempt, and to ease any fear he might have about what occurred between her and the people who employed her services. But her words only made him think she was too comfortable around prurient men like a Fishbein. It forced him to think of her past and convict her with the thoughts he harbored.

“By now you should be used to comments like that,” he told her, “with all the various jobs you’ve had.”

It was said more as a way to evoke her pity than with any intention of malice, as though he was the one who suffered just by having knowledge of her past. He wanted her to renounce her former life like a penitent, and become more suitable to the role of wife and the mother he wished her to become. Those were his plans, without any regard to money or how they would be accomplished. Any practical considerations Giambone made in his life were really not; all calculations and decisions were made from a sub-stratum of shifting emotion.

Delilah gave him a sidelong glance. His profile was framed by the dark rectangle of the ocean. He was brooding over something. She chose not to take offense at his remark but she didn’t like it. It was a hint of something she’d heard before, from other men, men who were happy to gain the chance to fuck her and who then disparaged the very qualities that had attracted them. He seemed to blame her when other men noticed the same things he had, indicting her for whatever erotic fantasies she inspired in the casual observer. She’d seen it happen with other men with whom she’d been intimate. It was fine for a lover to see her as a whore, his whore, but if anyone else did then the fact was confirmed. It shattered the illusion that she was for his exclusive use. It left the man with a bad taste in his mouth, and a strong inkling that there were a large number of men out there in the general population who had a tactile historical knowledge of Delilah.

He was making her angry.

“And what ‘various jobs’ are you referring to, Tony? Am I supposed to make excuses for the words that come out of my clients’ mouths? You can’t hold me responsible for the fact that men are horny beasts and will say what they will. You’re different than most men, Tony. You realize that? You’re more timid. You’ve never felt bold enough to talk crudely to a woman about sex and body parts as a staple of mundane conversation. Most men ignore the boundaries. They piss where they please.”

Giambone believed she might prefer that kind of man. The fact that she didn’t include him in that group seemed intended as a criticism of his masculinity.

“You mean most of the men you’re acquainted with. I doubt you would hear that stuff if you were working . . .”

“Where,” she interrupted. “On a construction site like you? Or a car dealership? A seminary? Where would I need to go, Tony, to be free of men’s need to wag their dicks? Huh?”

Her crude description made him wince. It didn’t bother him when she talked dirty when they were fucking. But in this context it was unseemly. Her facility with profanity disturbed him. It bolstered his fears that she was the type who could easily stray if the temptation were sufficient. Her familiarity with the language of the rabble was a sign that it was there that she was most at ease, and therefore prone to seek out its familiar comforts, its lewd behavior and easy, promiscuous sex. He was afraid that she might be compulsive about her need to be seen as sexually desirable. Could she be happy, he wondered, without hearing men shout, “shake your ass, baby!”

The scent of hibiscus and dead fish drifted across their path, pushed up the cliff from the west on a slight current of air sauntering in from the ocean. Giambone felt the light of the half moon as it warmed his forehead. He could see the slight shadow of his foot as it softly crushed the decomposed granite making up the path. A family of raccoon stirred in the Mexican sage on the other side of the decorative concrete fence that hugged the trail. A man and woman jogged past them in the other direction toward the Pier. Several grizzled young homeless men were settling down in a huddle on their sleeping bags. They lay on a grassy outcropping that ballooned away from the path, making a wide arc inwards from the side of the cliff. The men had lit a small candle and the light reflected the ruddy color of their wind burned skin. Their stained pants shone silvery with the dirt burnished in their tired threads. The lights from the condos and hotels that lined Ocean Avenue burned softly with a serene and welcoming glow. A few cars glided by. Giambone could see the dark silhouette of the Santa Monica Mountains piled up along the coastline to the north. A few solitary lights flickered at the edge of the land where development had been kept back from its westward crush, making him feel that there was still, not too far away, a wilderness in California, and a fleeting sense of a land empty of man. A land that was rugged yet temperate and fruitful for one who might live on it gently. A whimsical thought. But the dark tranquility of the broad mountains appealed to him, spoke to the anchorite that lingered at a deep layer of his being. He felt tired and the quiet strength of the mountains banked against the sea seemed to hold out the promise of a peaceful, solitary repose that eluded him in his life but for which he constantly ached.

Delilah brought him back.

“Why don’t you want to eat,” she asked him.

She wanted to extract whatever was bothering him. There were things in her life she was happy to leave unaddressed, but when it came to irritations of living with a lover on a daily basis, she had no patience for letting them fester. She couldn’t be in her home and call it her home if there were problems of accommodating oneself to another that could be quickly resolved.

“I don’t have any appetite.”

He resented her question. It reminded him that he was angry. He blamed her for his anger. He blamed her for introducing problems into what had been an infatuation just a short time ago. An infatuation that he felt had been unjustly abridged, and too swiftly, like the morning after a great party with expensive, plentiful booze. She was the sunlight in the eyes of a man with a tremendous hangover.

“I know you don’t have any appetite. My question is why don’t you want to eat. What’s wrong? Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong? Do I have to plead with you, Tony?”

“No, you don’t have to plead. I’m not hungry, okay?”

“Fine.”

Let him be hungry, she thought. She would fix something for herself when they got home.

“Why did you have to dance in the first place? Why that job?”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Is that what this is about? Is that what’s bothering you? Alright, Tony; let’s get it out. I should have seen this coming. I didn’t have to tell you at all, you know. Let’s have it then.”

She became afraid and sad. The relationship was turning now. The first major issue had been introduced and she was being put into a position of having to defend herself. She didn’t like it. It would turn out badly she thought. She would fight against the certainty of that. She wanted him, wanted everything she saw as promising that surrounded him, but she was proud. She would fight before surrendering her pride. Even if she agreed with him, acknowledging that there was something she had done she preferred to forget or change, she would never let a man, anyone, denounce her for it.

When she first told him, Giambone had become excited by the idea; by the knowledge of her standing naked on a platform under lights, with mirrors reflecting her image all around. They had been drinking. They had just finished having sex, yet he wanted her again. He couldn’t satisfy himself enough with her lithe body, her rutting desire for him. What she told him aroused him. He took the information she gave him and chose then to concentrate only on the image of her naked body on a lit runway before the eyes of anonymous men. She, her image, was a totem of sex and desire. She divulged this detail of her past at an intimate moment between them, and he was sensitive enough to know that she was asking him to accept this part of her history. He knew she was asking that he not judge her badly, and he complied, preferring instead to let the image of her body contort lasciviously in his brain. And then he had asked her to dance for him. At first she demurred, but he was insistent. So she said yes, to give him pleasure. And while she danced he stroked himself to hardness and then took her like it was his right and he fucked her vigorously until they were both spent, exhausted and fully satisfied.

In the days that followed, Giambone mused over the information she had conveyed and entrusted to him. Increasingly he weighed a number of inferences and interpretations. He carefully assigned more and more meaning to the terpsichorean theme of Delilah’s past, making deductions that suited him, that fit a pattern of his own design, and which begged further questions. Before he was done, he had created an entire psychopathology of deviance that he applied to her, not in any malicious way, but simply as a symptom of his own moral outlook, his need to employ whatever various theories of behavior that he felt were suitable. This was something he did for everything in his life, entertaining a wide selection of pseudo-scientific disciplines, from numerology and astrology, to reincarnation and Freudian analysis. He hadn’t tested any of these theories on Delilah, to see and gauge her response. That was a necessary step for him to take in order to develop the theory further. And once he began exploring an idea, an explanation for human behavior, he rarely abandoned it. If the idea was suggested to him, that was reason enough to accept it. He saw himself as a magnet for recondite knowledge, transmitted by way of the power of his intuition. He believed strongly in the infallibility of intuition.

“I’d just like to know how you came upon the idea of becoming a stripper. I mean, why did you choose that job and not some other, like, I dunno, a truck driver, or a lawyer, or a teacher? Why a stripper? It interests me, the reason why.”

As he asked this question, he stepped aside to let a large fat man pass by, walking in the other direction. The man was trying to navigate a tiny Jack Russell terrier on a retractable leash. The dog wandered erratically back and forth across the path. The ungainly pair made Giambone laugh. Delilah noted how the moonlight cast Giambone’s face in duotone, the bottom portion of his face was obscured and the top portion was a sallow, tawny color. It seemed to hover about his shoulders like an illuminated dome. His eyes were like pools of reflected light. He seemed insubstantial.

She chose her words carefully, and she lied.

“I don’t know, I mean it was just one of those things, I guess. I knew somebody, not a close friend, but someone who was doing it, and she told me it was easy money and there was no sex involved. That’s all.”

She looked at him to judge his response. He wore a smile, an awkward smile, one she’d seen before, when he was embarrassed about something, or uneasy about being taken for a fool.

“Maybe,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘maybe,’” she laughed. “It’s no maybe. That’s the reason, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney. Jesus Christ, Tony.”

“Well,” he went on, quite serious, “that may be the superficial reason you used to convince yourself that stripping is a reasonable activity. I happen to think it’s more closely related to your Leo rising sign and the fact that your sun is in Scorpio. You love attention – need it – and you’re drawn to anything that has to do with the underworld, the demimonde.”

“Fine. Sounds right. I agree. Then you can’t judge me, like you’re trying to do. If it has to do with my natal chart, then I’m not responsible. You can’t accuse me of being immoral.”

“I’m not accusing you of being immoral,” he protested.

His voice had an exasperated quality. It signaled the onset of his born defensiveness.

“Yes you are. You like it when I dance for you. But you can’t stand the idea that I may have done it for a room full of panting men. For you it’s acceptable; for anyone else it’s not – even if I did it before I ever knew you. I bet it upsets you, too, that you’re not the first man I’ve ever fucked.”

“No it doesn’t. You don’t have to talk so crudely.”

“Well, I don’t like being made to feel I have to justify my past to someone who’s acting like the Grand Inquisitor, Tony.”

“Anyway, just because you’re a Scorpio with Leo rising doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for your actions. Astrology doesn’t negate free will. It says you have personality traits. Those traits are proclivities in one’s nature, or potentialities that can be exercised positively or negatively. How you use those traits is up to you. You could have just as easily decided not to be a dancer.”

“Well, I didn’t. Just like you chose to devote seven years of your life to some religious megalomaniac. What made you do that? Something in your chart about the need to make yourself servile to authority figures?”

The temptation for sarcasm was strong when she was angry.

“I don’t see how you can equate trying to refine one’s spiritual sensibilities with flashing your tits for the purpose of giving horny men erections and getting them to buy more drinks. It’s not the same thing.”

“How do you know? Maybe my inner guide directed me to stripping for some higher purpose, and maybe you were directed to the Plutoids not in order to refine your spiritual sensibilities but to learn how easily the soul of a seeker can be manipulated to serve the commercial interests of a religious charlatan and Svengali. You realized it yourself, finally, if what you’ve told me is true.”

“And what higher purpose could stripping possibly serve,” he asked her, with a haughty laugh.

He irritated her. When they got into these discussions he often assumed he was in a more learned position to judge the progress of her soul or mind. His laughter betrayed his arrogance. It was a fallback position to disguise his uncertainty when someone was bold enough to disagree with his view of reality.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think the soul has to go through many permutations before it can arrive at some sublime or pristine condition. It’s like turning dross into gold, like the alchemists believed hundreds of years ago. Anyway, I don’t happen to think that stripping is necessarily evil, bad, socially or morally aberrant, like you do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say it, but it’s what you think. Tell me the truth, Tony. Why would we be having this conversation if my dancing didn’t bother you; because you feel it was wrong, that it somehow stains my character? Tell me you don’t believe that.”

“I don’t.”

“C’mon!”

“I don’t. I’m curious only because it interests me on a behavioral level. It seems foreign to me. I don’t know why someone would take their clothes off for strangers for the purpose of exciting them.”

“Is it any different from asking why someone, someone like yourself, for instance, would seek to entertain himself by watching one of these people who dance without clothes. Isn’t that just as interesting, behaviorally? Isn’t that a question that’s just as valid as yours?”

“So, what are you saying? I’m sexist?”

“I know it seems unnatural, but let’s leave gender out of it for the moment. What is more curious on a ‘behavioral level,’ as you put it; actively inciting sexual feelings in another human being, or allowing yourself to be incited; you know, putting yourself in a position where you want to be sexually incited? Which seems more questionable to you?”

“I don’t believe that you or most other female strippers are doing it because they want to incite sexual desire in their male clients. That’s secondary. They are doing it for economic reasons. They are coerced by an inequitable economic and political situation that exists in the world.”

“Who are you, Tony? Betty Friedan’s lap dog? Being a male feminist won’t get you laid anymore, you know. You don’t have to try so hard. You’re dick will do for most of us. We don’t depend on your virtue or political credentials, or your money.”

“Money will always be a consideration, I don’t care who you are, Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama. It certainly is for a stripper. You yourself said you did it for the money.”

“Those strippers are doing it because they can. It’s not the only option for a woman these days, you know. They do it because they can. Yes. There’s money to be made; sometimes a lot. Some of them, the older ones mostly, don’t like it. They’ve done it for too long and it’s too late for them, they think, to do anything else. And a lot of others are drawn not just by the money but because it’s a thrill, it’s a turn-on for them. They like sex, they like to dance. They even like men who want them and can’t have them, or only can have them for a price. There’s much to work with there, you know.”

“That brings me back to my original question, Delilah. Why did you strip? What did you get from it? What needs of your own did it meet, huh? You say you got into it because there was no sex involved, buy just now you said some dancers like it because of the sex. Which is it? There are a lot of ways to make money.”

The more he thought about her in some dive club surrounded by the mute faces of desire, the more he suffered from the indignity of it – not Delilah’s, but his own. The image of her strutting distressed him.

As they walked he lowered his head. His shoulders curved in toward his chest. He wore his odd smile that came from the dumb pain of trying to comprehend something. Little bursts of air escaped from between his lips, trailed by the sound of exertion, a dull grunting.

They entered the rose garden. It was a circular area with colorful varieties of the flower planted in soft mounds of soil, beds that were like a radial series of broken curved lines. From the sky it would have had the appearance of cleanly severed concentric circles, or a fanciful and abstruse Chinese hexagram. The flowers seemed strangely attentive. Their petals absorbed the moonlight, the rays of the unseen sun, dulling its brilliance but concentrating the luminosity in a caressing and gentle glow, as though each rose was generating its own heat and light, giving Giambone the sensation of being in the presence of tiny, fragile and sentient beings who were acutely sensitive to the entire tonic scale of human neural response. He felt as though he had walked into a gallery of exquisite feelings, with hundreds of organisms attuned to his and Delilah’s transiting passage, beholding them and, while capable of it, presently withholding judgment. 

Delilah wanted to rebel. Giambone’s question chafed her. She was torn between evading it and flinging the truth at him, out of spite for his intrusive interrogation. She had disclosed her past so he might see it as an emblem of her desire for greater intimacy, not as evidence used to incriminate her. She wanted Giambone as a safe harbor, a non-judgmental protector. But he only wished to discover the deeper motives for the choices she’d made. Once he knew them, she thought, what would he do with the information. His questions, which seemed accusatory, made her feel angry, reckless and vengeful, despite knowing that to act on those impulses would be injuries done mostly to herself.

“I suppose I chose to do it because I’m a born exhibitionist. I like being watched.” she told him defiantly.

She could see by his reaction that she’d hurt him. His mouth tightened. He ran his hand through his hair. Her impulse now was to salve the wound he’d invited her to inflict. She wanted to control the damage. There was too much to gain by being with him. But he spoke first.

“You were trying to fill some emptiness in you. You were desperate for love, any kind of love.”

He didn’t say this with any evident sympathy. He was unaware. He was judging her, stating the origin of her affliction, like a doctor fresh out of medical school, with a head full of diagnoses and no feeling for the frailty of the human heart. As always, he attempted to be analytical. If ever he were asked, he would say that his natal moon in Aquarius gave him the faculty of detachment, rather than providing him protection from his own torturous emotions. Impassive reason was the Gorgon’s head he could aim with lethal accuracy at the disconsolate souls whose pathologies were more disturbing and irrepressible than his own. 

“No,” she said firmly. “Why would I look there for love? If I wanted love, I would have advertised. I wanted reassurance. I wanted to see how much I could make a man drool, and do it in an environment where I wouldn’t be forced to pay the consequences if he got out of control. To be desired is like plugging into some colossal electromagnetic grid that contains all of life. To be desired is to be alive to an intense degree. I have never been more clear about who I am, never more certain of being a woman than when I saw a room full of men wanting to fuck me. It’s like I have the power to read minds. There is never any doubt, never any confusion. Few things in life are that certain, that astonishingly and lucidly honest.”

She looked at Giambone to see how he was handling all of this. Then she laughed.

“It did wonders for my self-esteem!”

“Yeah, I bet,” he mumbled with sarcasm.

He might have been able to look beyond this interlude in her life, if in fact it had been accomplished for the purpose of making money and only that. But she was basking in the memory of what she had experienced, even celebrating it. He was not a prude. He enjoyed sex as much as anyone. He believed that there was a need for businesses that marketed female flesh. Certainly there was a demand. He knew that if he were in a position of political power, in a position to change the status quo, he wouldn’t go after strip joints, other than forbidding them to operate next to churches and schools. He wouldn’t take it so hard if it weren’t a former stripper he was hoping to make the mother of his children. It was a fact that was beginning to signify future problems. Yet he supposed he was being hypocritical. And Delilah was not a typical stripper. She had a couple years of college, even if she had only majored in English. He couldn’t say the same for himself. Still, there was an unsavory aspect about it, from which he couldn’t detach himself. And he didn’t care, really, if he was being a hypocrite. He would fuck a stripper. And he had. But he didn’t want her especially imparting a moral education to his children. Then again, it was unfair to condemn her for past behavior, for making the kind of choices made when one is young and callow and stupid. If he did that, how many people would he have to exclude from his life? He would be alone in the world, not even in a position to live with himself. Certainly he had done things about which he felt ashamed. But it was a matter of degree; whether someone was prone to repeat her past behavior, or could sagely recognize it for the poor judgment and folly it signified. But Delilah felt no shame, and he wanted her to. This is what really disturbed him. Not the fact that she had stripped for a living, but that she chalked it up as a valuable life experience, an episode from which she gained what was for her the equivalent of truth. It was meaningful. It had merit. She would recommend it to others. Would she recommend it to her own daughter, his daughter?

But there was something more immediately threatening that was troubling him, the reason he wished to see her without taking time to eat at the restaurant.

 “When you were a dancer at Billy’s, was there ever any sex involved?”

“What do you mean? I was a dancer. What kind of sex are you talking about?”

She was uncomfortable with this question. She had hoped that her vague theorizing about stripping would have been enough to forestall any further investigation. She knew better, even before she told him. Her hope for a different kind of resolution had trumped her normal good sense for discretion about the way she made a living.

“What did you get paid to do there? What kind of contact did you have with the customers?”

“Contact? It was just the usual stuff, the normal shit. Why do you care about this, Tony? What difference does it make? I told you about this in confidence. So you could trust me. I wanted to be honest about my past. You’re not going to throw it back at me now, are you?”

She didn’t like the sound of his voice. It was judgmental. There was contempt in it.

“Contact. I’m talkin’ about physical contact. Did they touch you? Did you touch them?”

“Tony, you know what goes on in there. You even said you’d been to Billy’s once. What did you see? You tell me. C’mon, baby; what’s this all about anyway?”

“Did they touch you? Were there any arrangements for touching?”

“No. There were strict rules against that. There was lap dancing. That was as physical as it got. And the tipping, putting money in our G-strings. That was it.”

“No private shows or any of that crap?”

“At Billy’s? Honey, you know what that place is like. Private shows? Where?”

Already she’d told him too much. It remained to be seen whether her attempt to be honest – the admission of her past mistakes, mistakes that were depicted in broad strokes, not the detail he was after now – would be an ongoing source of resentment or a chance for them to grow closer. It was not going well. He wasn’t leaving it alone. From now on she would be more careful. She had to protect herself. There was so little safety. Everything she did was liable to being assailed. The ones who approved were precisely the ones who didn’t care about her. The men who impugned her choices would never let her breathe. Each of these types had something to give her. She had to be different for them, ingratiating herself like a foreigner in a strange land, trying to learn which motions are sublime in the church of all believers and which actions will earn a sentence of death. Her vigilance increased. She became more conscious of what she already knew. Giambone could be sweet, but he was a man.

“What about protection?”

Giambone was careful not to accuse her without learning first about some detail that would allow him to safely infer her guilt. If something happened in his life, it happened to him. He was an entity upon which all others acted. There was narcissism in this, but not the narcissism of a prime mover. He had great difficulty in seeing himself as the agent of his own destiny.

“What are you talking about, Tony? I hate when you do this. You’re upsetting me. I’m getting angry. What’s bothering you? What is it you want to know?”

“I want to know if you used protection. With others. Before me. Safe sex.”

Delilah was relieved. She could answer this. She and Giambone had used condoms at first, until they both assured the other they were clean. Words alone made it safe. From then on, after they assumed they were monogamous, they had unprotected sex. If this was all he was worried about, her distress at the evening could subside.

“Of course,” she said. “Whaddya think? I’m crazy?”

There were times when she hadn’t used protection with a few different casual partners. But she’d had blood tests. Since the last test, a month before meeting Giambone, she’d let no ejaculate inside her. She was sure she had nothing to worry about.

Giambone was stymied. He didn’t know where exactly he picked it up. It could’ve been Delilah. But he hadn’t always worn a condom with others before her. But why now? So soon after meeting her. Perhaps it was a coincidence. But she had been a stripper. His suspicions were magnified. He had no one else to blame. He had to start with her and work his way back. He was angry, and when he got angry, his capacity for handling reason’s scalpel became shaky.

“I’ve got these goddamned blisters on my dick, for fuck’s sake. Where the hell did I get these things? I wanna know what you know about it, Delilah.”

Anger and shame were mixed in his voice, a plaintive and desperate sound that crawled from his throat, startling Delilah. It made her think of some heroic figure in the movies, accustomed to his gift of almost supernatural strength in the face of all adversity. When the brave hero is suddenly cut down, he issues a cry of great anguish, a cry that repels his audience. They are appalled at this sudden display of weakness, one that is all the more glaring and reprehensible when it is shown against the relief of the character’s past heroic deeds. They lose faith in his ability and want to crush him, or shut him away from sight, for he is not a god after all. He is just like them. They want a god.

She stopped walking and turned to face him. She pitied him and hated him, and she felt fear from her own guilt. She wanted to erase the moment. Her mind was treading, suspended between alarm and calculation.

“What sores? What are you talking about, baby? What’s wrong?”

She put her hand on his arm. He cringed, as though his affliction should be dreadful to the touch. He saw himself through her eyes and was disgusted.

“I don’t know what the hell they are. Little blisters on the head of my dick. I never had ‘em before, before I met you. I don’t know what’s goin’ on, Delilah. You tell tell me you were a nude dancer. You work with old rich creeps in their fancy homes, and now I’ve got some shit on my dick. You tell me. What’s goin’ on? I never had these before.”

“Tony, I’m not sure what’s goin’ on. Please calm down. I don’t know what you’ve got. But you just can’t blame me like that. I don’t like it. It’s not right. I don’t know what you’ve got. Did you talk to a doctor? You’ve got to get it checked out.”

“No. No. I will. I just don’t understand how I got them. I think it’s herpes. Where the hell would I get it? You have to tell me, Delilah. Did I get it from you? Is this what I get? Is this what I get? Your gift from your sleazy past?”

“That’s not fair, Tony and you know it? You could’ve got them anywhere. Herpes can take years to incubate. You could’ve got them from someone you don’t remember, some one-night stand ten years ago. Don’t blame me.”

“How the hell do you know? How do you know so fuckin’ much about herpes? I don’t have one-night stands. You’re another story.”

“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that. Don’t assassinate my character.”

“You’ve given me plenty of ammo, why not?”

“You’re an asshole. What do you know? You’ve been with me, what, two months, and I’m the only one who could give you herpes? You don’t know shit. But I see what you’re all about. You’re no better than me. Don’t malign my character. If you are gonna spend the rest of our lives suspecting me just because I thought I could trust you enough to tell you about my dancing, well, you can go fuck yourself.”

She would have told him if he hadn’t accused her. It had been more than a year since her last outbreak. She was sure she hadn’t given it to him. There had been no occasion to tell him yet. She never even thought about it unless she was having an episode. He must have contracted it from someone else. She was sure of it. But now she was in a bind. If she told him now, he would always blame her, whether she infected him or not. If she denied it, he would never be sure. And the next time she did have an outbreak, she could blame him for infecting her. She had told him too much already. Why give him more information to use against her, to fling at her every time they had a fight?

Giambone was in pain. He tried to talk but he found the situation incredulous. He sputtered some sounds. He laughed. His laughter was similar to a man’s who understands the absurdity of his situation and his powerlessness to change it. Then he quietly began to weep. What was happening was but another indication of the world’s impersonal malice. He fought against this knowledge by his ferocious reading of books that tried to explain where his power lay. But there always seemed to be another defeat that awaited him. He squatted down on the path like a Chinese waiting for a bus or pausing to smoke on dry provincial road, and he looked out at the ocean and let himself cry. The only sound that came from his open mouth was the strain of air as he tried to breath against the onslaught of self-pity that was forcing itself through his solar plexus and lungs. He quaked as though he was possessed by a great living disturbance that found his body like a geyser finds a portal in the earth’s crust. The tears were squeezed from his eyes and fell to the pulverized stone of the path, each drop absorbed by the crushed mineral and responding to the impact by emitting tiny eruptions of dust, as when rain hits the desert floor. The bony palms teetered high above him in a stately row, leaning toward the west as though they were straining to hear the sound of the horizon. The wind played gently with the shaggy heads of the pampas grass. Scalloped rows of pale yellow pods at the center of a broad yucca plant rattled like a shaman’s talisman against the plane of the black sea. Delilah knelt down next to Giambone. He let her hold him and run her hand through his hair. She kissed him on his cheek, and then coaxed him up, leading him back to their separate cars and the concrete road home in another part of the tangled city.