I had inhaled the poison of their adultery in the gallery – sucked on it and emerged alive – but out on the streets Marius and Marisa were still far apart, orgiasts only in a future I’d been rearranging for them. If leaving things a week had been a bad idea for him, it had been a bad idea for her as well. A game was fun for Marisa, and then it wasn’t. A man was hot, and then he wasn’t. The two great lessons of her childhood. This is not to say it didn’t irk her not to hear from him the minute he had her number. At first she ’d have enjoyed the idea that he was having trouble finding it, going through the gallery on his hands and knees, a fool to her ingenuity – he who thought he knew what made her tick. But when a further week went by, and then another, she had to face the possibility that he didn’t have her number because he hadn’t put himself to the trouble of looking for it. I was sorry for her. I am, as I have said, a connoisseur of fine insult. ‘Well I had fun finding it, anyway,’ I’d have liked to tell her.
