His head bobbed more than nodded on the pillow.

She stood up. “My makeup took so long. We will be late out of here.” The disclaimer sent her back into the bathroom to clear away toiletries.

Michael sat up; his pants and shirt were wrinkled beyond amendment. The warming rays of the Sun nevertheless pushed him to his feet. He confidently (if slyly) approached Emma at the sink wanting to cuddle. What he got was an elbow in his ribs.

“I just put on my makeup,” she said coolly. “Weren’t you listening?”

He backed away, keeling.

She caught his reaction in the medicine cabinet mirror, and he could only gauge her expression as one of weariness over his easy wounds. Taking hold of the toilet seat cover, she closed it with a melodramatic smack and sat down; a solitary tear gummed up her mascara. “I was wrong,” she declared. “Wrong about there being no tomorrow.”

The lover stumbled out from under the pile of bricks to find himself at her knees.

She looked at the frosted bathroom window next to her, pretending to see through it. Her sigh smelled of toothpaste and perfume. “I thought I knew what I wanted,” she said. “I thought I had convinced myself.” Turning a tuft of his hair, she added, “It’s nothing to do with you, though.”

Michael was notorious for parsing words, which made women as frustrating as standardized tests. He was already fading away down her long legs.

Emma smiled at last, wiping away the one tear. “It was wrong of me to bring you here.”

In his estimation, the only thing worst than not owning bad behavior was owning it a little too quickly and casually.

Having finished her little thought-through speech, the suddenly collected child-of-a-girl stood up to exit the bathroom, leaving her lover scrunching on hard, grouted tile. Her hips swiveled in the bright window as she fetched about in her suitcase for more shoes. He watched her, and like a moonfaced boy eyeing a piece of candy in a case he had supposed to be his.

The timbre of her voice was irritatingly blithe as she strapped on a pair of oyster grey sandals. “We’ll be the best of friends.”

He turned her words back on her. “But you don’t want me as a friend.”

His comment caught her short. “You mean you don’t want me as a friend?” Emma pondered their evolving dynamic as she rooted around in her purse. “I don’t know what to think about this.”

Ambiguous words were met with ambiguous silence.

She amended her offer. “We’ll simply say: there are privileges.”

Privileges? he thought.

“Let’s do lunch, today!” she exclaimed. “I can take thirty minutes at work for lunch.”

He found a little backbone. “My friend is coming to visit me today.”

“Friend?” she chided. “But you don’t have friends.”

“More a brother,” he grudgingly explained. “Since childhood.”

Finding another lipstick shade to her liking, she stepped up to the dresser mirror. Her pretty eyes, framed too perfectly in the glass, stung, though it was the peevish warble that betrayed her injury. ”Is he going to stay the whole day?”

“No.”

She freshened her plum lipstick, still looking a little inconvenienced in the two-way reflection. “Maybe we can get together later, then.”

Michael did not respond to her Plan B.

Crawling onto the bed, Emma stripped away the linen—stripped away their scents with nary a care to it. Fresh sheets were pulled from the bottom chest drawer and the bed was remade. The incriminating load of laundry was picked up off the floor. “I need to put these things in the laundry room before we leave.”

The blindsided man returned to the edge of the bed to lace up his shoes, listening to her clap down the hall on feet that were altogether too bouncy.

This was the price he would pay for loving a girl barely out of diapers. Even allowing for her being deft in the feminine arts, she was a woman in all but fact. Regardless, he was hopelessly mired in it, and she was gloating like a conquering child. It was impossible at this juncture that he should walk away, though the projected path of what lay ahead of them was painfully familiar. There would be the stolen nights from her fiancé, though such trysts would be more like sexually frustrating slumber parties where late-hour handholding and pillow talk would occasionally erupt into temper tantrums and pleading at the bathroom door. Owing to the genius of her sex, everything she would likely do or say from here on would smack of stagecraft and ulterior motive. She would be turning his worshipfulness off and on to suit herself, and he, lost to all sense, would anticipate every flip of the switch like Pavlov’s dog. An occasional backrub would suffice (in her imagination at least) as maintenance. Normally he would simply tire of his starvation rations after a while, and usually more quickly than the woman would expect. It was all a game, of course. She would either allow the relationship to be consummated or not—either dump her fiancé or not—, although by the time it was resolved one way or another he would already be emotionally on the way out.

He stood up with a mind to either rock or pace, but he was not at liberty to indulge either compulsion.

He was older now, and hanging on by his teeth to the very last of his youth. There was no time left for pride or prudent judgment. Emma was, in all other aspects, his ideal personified. He would never love a more beautiful woman, and could only hope under his influence she would ripen into the better person he knew she was capable of being. His timing, however, was regrettably early in this regard. Those creatures he chose to love invariably moved away to grow into splendor somewhere else, thus leaving him behind in their hard, green inexperience. Some other, luckier man would time the acquaintance better than he, and would thereby escape the foibles of youth the romantic painter was destined to repeat without end. He must, he thought, break this cruel cycle by finding a way to make Emma work. Michael needed to put whatever true regard the woman bore him, and they bore each other, into terms that would not be subject to change.

“It’s late!” She hurried in from the hall to retrieve her suitcase. A tentative pet name was plucked out of a grab bag. “Come, sweetie! And bring the pumpkin!"

They did not drive back the way they came. Emma called it a short cut, but it was no such thing. There was, for the first time, anxiousness in her face, or so he dared to imagine. Before they rejoined the paved road, they crossed onto a cutaway that looked out onto another wooded road; a cloud of dust was kicked up from a pickup just passing down it. The young woman stopped short of where the two roads intersected and watched the vehicle go by with study. When the dust settled, and the path was clear, she turned down her visor on the pretense of checking her makeup in yet another mirror. Michael rifled through his cinematic templates to name this look, too: It best resembled restored equanimity.

They drove back over what seemed a less sinister landscape, and by the time they reached the outskirts of town Emma had fleshed out more of her Plan B. “They’re having a memorial for Jacques over at the chapel on campus today. Would you like to go with me?”

Michael did not know Omar’s plans, but knew he would not stay the entire day.

“Evan is supposed to come to town later this afternoon,” she went on. “He wants me to come back to the country with him, but I’m telling him I have to go to this thing and will drive down later this evening. That way we can spend a few hours together.”

The other man wanted to tell her he would be painting that afternoon, but, again, he could only have one obsession at a time; and she was now it.

“Call me around four,” she added.

“What if a man answers?”

His question vexed her. “Then just ask for me. It’s no big deal, Michael. We’re just going to a memorial service together.”

The pet name had been jettisoned, and they had backtracked, momentarily, into proper names. He disliked her new tone with him, so turned his attention to the careworn bushes along the dusty road. Once again, he was thinking of movies.

It was like him to fall in love with the lead actress and watch a film over and over again without cessation. His gushing heart would be uncritical in its initial praise, and only with over-familiarity would his eye wander off-script into peripheral details the filmmaker never intended for scrutiny. The fantasy, from there, would unravel from the inside out, beginning innocently when an untouched water pitcher would be noticed changing sides on a table during a conversation, and then onto the late discovery of a subtle tic in the actress’ facial mannerisms. Eventually it would come down to reading the lips of background characters, and finally spying the one guy in the crowd looking directly into the camera and mumbling, “I am the devil.” By then, he would be watching an entirely different movie: a movie so painfully familiar that it was completely alien.

He recalled one incident from a subsequent viewing of The Exorcist some three decades after the film’s release, where in the Ouija board scene (still in the tranquil early going of the story) Linda Blair’s character, Regan, is seen bearing a greenish hand. It could have been from the green tempera she was using to paint a clay bird at the time, but these marks, resembling bruises and spots, were on the back of her hand where no brushed paint could reasonably reach. It was undoubtedly an oversight by the makeup artist to remove these marks of demonic possession from a previous, out-of-sequence shooting of another scene, but the abruptness of stumbling over this detail did not so much undermine the movie’s supernatural theme as underscored it. Perhaps the script of any story is never truly finished: one only delves deeper into its layers of appearance. The genius of a magician is not to hide the miraculous, but the obvious; and for Michael, the obvious, to his undoing, was always the most miraculous thing of all.

Emma left him standing at the curb by his house and chirped through the rolled-down passenger window. “Bring your friend by the coffeehouse! I would love to meet him!”

The Nova sped away, though Michael tarried in the tailpipe fumes half hoping the whim-prone girl would come back with a kiss and an undying proclamation of love.

His negligible history with women told him it would be characteristically un-female for her to do that.

Granddaddy and the Toy Stacker (1959)