HE DOES THE PAVEMENT DIFFERENT. The lesbian said that. She'd been studying the book earlier, on the couch with the roach clip that she said was made by Choctaws, from Oklahoma. I was in no place to doubt any of it. I just nodded. It was a book about John Singer Sargent in Venice, with pictures—a coffee table book. It had been on the coffee table when we arrived. It had, moreover, been a present, inscribed, a gift from some museum in Italy for the owner of the house, an Italian chef of some minor local fame. I had taken the dust jacket off and left it inside when the three of us came out to the hot tub, though I sat by the side in a plastic chair, dry.

The lesbian had worked with him in a restaurant once, the chef, the house's owner, back before he became semi-famous. She'd waited tables with his wife, too, which was what she did now, the lesbian, at the French place where my girlfriend had started on as pastry chef. I was in graduate school for geology, which maybe explained the pavement comment. I couldn't say. They were rocks—blonde, worn, wet. It was Venice, and I should know the name of them, likely, and know how they were quarried and when and from where. I was a little stoned, too, and a little drunk. My perception or my ability to understand what got perceived was sluggish, drowning.

My girlfriend dipped under the surface of the water, leaving only her wine-glass hand unsubmerged. The lesbian squealed, and my girlfriend rose up again, grinning. Her hair hung long, in thick wet bands. She wiped it out of her face with her free hand and took a drink of wine, leaned back against the wall of the hot tub. The lesbian just giggled this time. Her hair was up in a loose bun, and she was wearing a t-shirt that said something on it, except the t-shirt was soaked through and you couldn't read the words, orange on orange. She had big, dark nipples and was proud of them. She was half something, maybe Choctaw. I could never remember. But often that winter my girlfriend would say, Like Kennedy dollars, and tweak them through whatever the lesbian was wearing. She was never wearing a bra.

This Sargent had an eye for certain things, the shoulders of women, the napes of their necks, how their hair gets held up or falls. That I liked, I guess, and how all the paintings represented on the thick glossy pages looked like they were lit by different weather, by variable clouds and seasons. I guess all painters can do that, or the ones that are good. On one page, women sat inside a sort of factory, dark but pierced by short diagonals of window light. They were making beads, the text said, out of rods of glass. There were words for the tools and chemicals involved. The whole scene was claustrophobic, like the roof and walls were leaning in, threatening to collapse.

Oh, pool boy. My girlfriend said this. She was a specialist at crêpes, for which there is another, longer, French word. She had finished culinary school in the spring and come out here, showing up the same weekend my wife left, though we didn't get together that fast. I refilled her glass, emptying the bottle. Then I went inside to get another as the lesbian lifted out of the water and reached for the bong. The Choctaw roach clip was on the counter, and the crescent-shaped Tupperware of weed, with a lime shaving. Whether this was the chef's or the lesbian's I never found out. Inside the cabinets were at least twenty varieties of olive oil and as many of vinegar. There was wine in a high cabinet and wine in a cabinet with oatmeal and spices and wine on a vertical metal rack. The lesbian had said when she was given the gig, house-sitting, she'd been assured she could use anything there, so I opened a bottle with a label like a legal form, a decade old. The kitchen had a window out to the patio where the hot tub was. There was a sound of splashing and laughing and a sort of relaxed scream. I went through the fridge—heavy in pastes and Asian chili sauces, grapefruits—and the cabinets under the counter, where there was a big plastic drum of protein powder and bag after bag of Easter candy, though this was mid-November.

The wine took on a more metallic flavor after a handful of miniature candy eggs. With a mug of it I went to the bathroom to see what pills they had, selecting one for post-surgical pain and one for stress, slipping an extra dose of each into my pocket, for later. There were ob tampons and several jars of hair gel and a tube of overnight blemish eliminator cream, a tube of hemorrhoid treatment. There were multi-vitamins and vitamin E and vitamin B12 and an unopened jar of hangover prevention pills. In the bedroom I went through the dresser drawers and closets and looked at the pictures of the chef and his wife on vacation after vacation. Here they were in pirate hats and beads, open-mouthed drunk. Here they were hiking somewhere thick with firs, wearing wet ponchos. Here they were dancing at their own wedding, looking very young, the chef in a sort of buzz cut, the wife without some thirty post-marriage pounds.

Pool boy. She didn't use her flirty or her friendly or her nice voice. That was the scale that got descended, the ranking of where her mood was. I went straight out and poured some wine for her and she said Don't steal anything, which I guess she meant as a joke. The lesbian wasn't drinking. She said she didn't drink, but she always said that, and today she'd stopped drinking because she was really high and probably pretty drunk. She tried to ask if I wanted to get in, to join them, but she mixed up the words and started laughing and couldn't stop. She began to choke, and my girlfriend said to me, Could you make sure the bong doesn't get wet. It wasn't a question. Then the lesbian recovered and she looked at us like she didn't know why we were looking at her. She had forgotten what she had been laughing about.

I took up the book again, and the chair, and looked at a fountain in some plaza somewhere, in small photographs and then in a series of sketches and paintings, different angles, different framings, different details emphasized. There was a sea horse or something, spouting, plus some kind of Poseidon, riding it, with his pitchfork and all. There were more works with pavement, and I guess I could see what the lesbian meant—he treated the pavement like a portrait, the wear of the stones, the slopes and gaps, how the sun caught it or how the water pooled, ran.

My girlfriend was bored. She made one of her loud bored sighs, a kind of signal she had, and she got out and wrapped herself in a towel. She said we needed to eat, that she was hungry. That was the sort of drinker she was—if she didn't eat now it would all end badly. She flicked some water on me and on the book, then went inside. She was wearing a bikini, dark purple, then she was wearing two towels. The lesbian watched me as I watched her go. She looked at me that way for a long time and then said, It's real nice and warm in here. Make your skin wrinkle up. I tried to think of something to say but she beat me to it. You seem so sad, she said. You always seem so sad.

Something broke in the kitchen. My girlfriend cursed. The lesbian's brow got all bunched up, and she clutched the sides of the hot tub, sort of crouching down, afraid. She was like that when she got too stoned. Are you okay? she said, in a different voice. Then she jumped out and knocked her knee against part of the tub and nearly fell. She ran inside, saying Honey? Honey?

The water on the page with the picture of the fountain, globules of it, had sunk in and warped the paper, wrinkled it, distorting the image a little. There was a sense that the world was following an organizing logic just beyond my ability to grasp, that there were clues and there were false clues and I kept getting lost in the mix. I knew, more or less, the sort of mess that would be inside, so I took my time going in. My girlfriend stood in the puddle of oil and blood and seemed not to mind. She was opening a jar of oysters, and then she was using a wooden spatula to cull bits of broken glass from out of the oil in the big sauté pan. Fuck cleaning it up, she said to the lesbian, Start some pasta. Then she said something about being too drunk to make risotto, and that it was a shame, the asparagus and all, and then, There should be a bottle of Campari around here, right? This dick is an Italian chef.

There were pictures of him on the kitchen walls, with pieces of food or cooking implements, ingredients. There was a small snapshot of him in a vineyard and another of him with some sort of freshly-wrestled fish. He wore a white hat in the framed cover from the local magazine. In the framed page from the newspaper's listing of top ten young chefs he had his sleeves rolled up to show his tattoo. Something Italian I guess—I didn't really look. The lesbian was still trying to sweep, in panties and that soaked-through t-shirt. For a while I had tried to correct my girlfriend, that the Kennedy piece was only fifty cents, but that was before, I guess, I really got to know her. It didn't make sense to correct her on things. She only got angry, then she'd forget.

The lesbian smeared oil more evenly over the floor, and made a pile of glass, propping the broom in a corner. She picked up the bottom of the bottle, which was still intact and jagged. Then she realized she didn't know what to do with it, so she put it back on the floor, behind the greased bottom of the broom. My girlfriend started the pasta herself. Eventually she wrapped her foot in one of the towels she had worn in from the pool and stood on it that way. I poured her more wine, and she turned and kissed me on the cheek. She smashed some garlic with the flat of the knife and diced up some onion and some peppers and the lesbian tried to rub her back, but she twisted away and told her to handle it from here. She took me by the hand, favoring her good foot but walking on both of them.

She led me down the hall and pushed me onto the bed. She was hobbling now from being drunk, and trying to be sexy in that rough way she had. She smashed her face against mine, and began tugging at the buttons of my pants. Her facial expressions were like those of enduring some chore, but when she was drunk or guilty she took me inside her mouth, after a while of which I wasn't so shrunken. She got on top, and we managed it. I could have even come, maybe, except the room began to smell like smoke and she unstraddled me and leaned down quick, biting my ear and hissing, You have no fucking idea how much I fucking love you. Then she pushed past the lesbian in the doorway and was talking in that other register of hers: You could have at least turned the stove off.

But nothing was too burnt, and the dinner, when we finally ate it, was good, with a pungent dry cheese, grated, and the asparagus, which had its own strong flavor. At some point we switched from wine to Scotch, stupidly, but the lesbian knew how to work the box on the television such that it would play the Simpsons straight for hours, for days. The women were in new clothes, layered. My girlfriend had a hood on. The lesbian wore a sock cap in the colors of the Italian flag. I started to shiver some, so the lesbian pulled an afghan off the back of the couch and draped it over me, tucking in the edges.

Without commercials, there was no way to measure the passing of time. At some point, during what I guess was one of the Halloween specials, something about a curse, where Bart's neck turns to rubber and Marge's whole body furs over in blue hair, I noticed that my girlfriend was crying, quietly. She had her hands in her lap and was biting her lower lip. Her face was contorted and the tears were running down her cheeks and they had pooled a little in a line across her chin, which shimmered in the television light. The lesbian leaned against the corner of the couch, her mouth open, asleep. I couldn't really pay attention to the show anymore, and I knew better than to talk to her, so I just sat it out, waiting there, pretending to pay attention to the shifting patches of color on the screen. Eventually, she went to bed, and later, careful not to wake her, I followed.


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