As the passageway narrowed, it darkened even more with snarling trestles; loud gas-powered generators and hissing tanks of compressed air only made matters worse. A blue-grey nimbus promised a patch of night sky ahead, and when Michael emerged from his latest rite of passage he was clueless as to where they were. Marquees, heavily shellacked and glistening with embedded insects, rose up in a fortress around them to create a refuge for otherwise space-starved shadows. A chain-linked fence was visible behind one, and appeared to be their next destination.

The photographer glanced back with a furtive glint. “There’s a gate on the other side of these billboards!”

Both ducked under a padlocked chain and were quickly creeping along a weedy boundary shared with the motel. Michael squinted up at the large neon-blue moon perched precariously on the roof ledge; it sputtered down the words, Peek-a-boo Motel. The brazen girl glanced up too, but not at the signage. A maid’s cart was outside one of the rooms on the second level. She was at once catapulting up the loosely riveted rod iron stairs. The peeling handrail shimmied and flaked with each shift of her shapely bottom, although the heart-stopping view of her from below was mitigated by alarm for what she was up to. Michael reached the second floor to see her rush along the narrow walkway and brush each doorknob with open fingers; all the rooms were named The Honeymoon Suite. A chorus of pounding headboards ushered out of the squat building, effectively trapping the timid man between the scrawny rail and exterior wall. He hurried by the doors, noting a knot of flesh and bed sheet in the crack of one. Emma’s heels had locked outside the open door where the cart was. Without needing to say anything, the demure maid squeezed out around the taller woman with her bottle of glass cleaner.

The empty room before the couple was a dank, windowless dungeon. Sections of flimsy, wood-paneled walls bowed outward, as if pressed in a vice, while a preverbal yellowed lampshade lent a tawdry glow to the few sticks of furniture. Emma, thoroughly entertained by the seedy décor, blithely stretched out on the bed like a sleek cat. Even amid such grubbiness, her turquoise eyes shined.

“Isn’t this place hysterical?” she squealed.

A television (turned off) sat near the foot of the bed. A screw cap bottle of wine and a plastic jack-o-lantern brimming with Day-Glo condoms sat on a bureau across from it. As Michael’s gaze swept lightly over these accoutrements, he noticed queer tube-like shadows on the wall behind them. When they suddenly moved—and in a way that suggested the legs of an insect—he twisted around to see a wooly spider on the lampshade. The rumble in the wall drew his attention up to a video camera. Its lens was trained on the bed with voyeuristic intent: The whole place is wired with live closed-circuit television.

The young woman’s hip rose majestically out of the lumpy bed on turning to face him; the cut line of her was confidently quick. “Well, Mr. West,” she growled. “Aren’t you going to take your putt-putt bride? To have and to hold?”

Michael remained in the doorway, disconnected from Emma’s naughty intrusion. In his judgment, she was making into flirtation something that was, in many ways, still infantile to her. It was a piece of stagecraft rehearsed in her genes, if not entirely in her forethoughts. (The painter was prone to analyze [or overanalyze] any and all “moments of truth” that snuck up on him. Intellectual detachment, no matter how hastily or shoddily erected, was his signature excuse for never leaping into the unknown.)

The girl was slow to register his disapproval, but on appreciating it sat up more self-consciously than she had lay down. She made a segue of her watch. “I guess we should go before they kick us out.” There was a cobbled-together grin for him as she crawled off the bed. It was the blind of a guilty teenager, and made him feel every day of his age.

Michael was the one who was talkative on the car ride back to town, and mainly because he wanted to redeem himself for his poor showing on so many fronts.

Emma pulled up along his Saturn to let him out. As he was about to close the door, resigned to failure, she leaned over to peek up at him. “If you’d like, you could come by my studio over at Arbor Hall in the late morning. I’m eager to show you more of my work.”

“That would be nice,” he said.

The graduate student drove away with only an infectious smile by way of a goodbye.

The painter stood by his car for a long minute. He could not say where things were going, but was comforted by the ambiguity he perceived in the Emma's situation. As long as he supposed she had a lover, he believed himself to be safe.

Michael’s relationship with women was a complicated one, and in more than a difference of age. As a young man, he had been terminally shy. In fact, it was not until his late twenties he finally overcame his shyness well enough to attempt dating. He always had a capable wit, and eventually discovered he could adapt this talent to the art of flirtation. Unfortunately, this activity became an end in itself and bore little fruit. At best it produced friendships with sexual attraction as a component; at worst, it led to unrealized aspirations that ended painfully in awkwardness. Michael was not an unattractive man, but his feelings of inadequacy and fear of rejection crippled any chance he had at forming a significant attachment. In spite of the obstacles, a few efforts at romance were attempted before the age of thirty-three. All of them were with females who, in some sense, pursued him. Resultantly, they were ass-backward affairs where, grateful to be spared the embarrassment of making a declaration of intent, the man found himself being pulled along by circumstance and a strong-willed woman until evitable difficulties ended the union. These difficulties generally stemmed from a lack of communication: The painter misread cues, interpreted silences wrongly, and saw any rebuff as the beginning of the end. Not all these relationships were fully consummated, but even of the ones that were, none lasted more than six weeks.

There were still attractive women to return his stares, but what had been arduous labor stoically borne in youth was now viewed with a smidgen of resentment—if not outright indifference. Even when he was actively courting, he felt the onerous burden of making the relationship “engaging” fell disproportionately on him. He either had to invent the woman from the most meager of surfaces, or invent excuses to justify her glaring flaws. It was work for him either way: to carry on a conversation for two or hold his tongue. Still, it was not that the painter was no longer capable of falling in love because of such difficulties, but the duty—the pleasure—of making an extraordinary effort was never asked of him by the prize of an extraordinary woman. In short, he had spent his whole life being faithfully, even heroically, in love with a female he never met.

Omar was fond of saying that to attribute causation to anything other than physics or biochemistry was approaching a lie, so Michael was inclined to give his hesitancy in matters of the heart many names. All true—but none sufficient to explain his contradictory pulls of being both overwhelmed and under-whelmed by his choices. To claim to always know what one wants, he believed, reveals either bravery in the face of doubt, or happy-go-lucky dimwittedness that never has any doubt. Fundamentalists and atheists never had any doubt, and Michael found their company tedious. Yet even being double-minded was to be too simpleminded in his judgment. The presumption that actions and inactions can be so readily reduced to cause and effect shows a complete inattentiveness to the rude arrangements of life: We act first and later construct justifications for it.

Regardless of the mechanics of it, Michael was certain of one thing: He loved the absolute ideal absolutely. It could be argued his idealism was merely the ruse of biology, but that he attached value to his ideal outsized everything else. One could liken it to painting a picture. What begins as a process of means soon transcends its materials. A painting is no longer a collection of brushstrokes, but something more. As to what that something more would look like in a female form, he could not say. But he hoped it would be someone he could not anticipate: someone who knew his heart better than he knew it himself: someone Jane Austen would pick for him.