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improvisations.
    “Keep your satin-fingered silkiness below the skirtline,” she said and added, “Don’t. Stop.”
    Her word-order confused him. He wondered if she meant “Don’t” and “Stop” or “Don’t stop.” If she wanted him to stop, he reasoned, she could always push him away; instead, she was clinging more firmly than ever, almost hysterically.
    “Oh, Haldane, please stop.”
    She was weeping, and he hadn’t wished to make her cry. Besides, she was definitely asking him to stop, so he disengaged himself and arose to light another cigarette, carefully lighting the nonfiltered end. He noticed that his hand trembled slightly, and he laid the cigarette down to remove his handkerchief from his tunic. Strangely, a simple exercise in ancient courtship had given him an insight into history—he could understand the population explosion. Bending to dab her eyes, he knew that, had she been even slightly receptive, he might have committed miscegenation, despite his self-promises.
    She opened her eyes and looked up at him with hostility. “Were you at one of those houses before you came here?”
    Perplexed by her irrelevancy, he answered bluntly. “I haven’t since Point Sur.”
    She must have believed him. “We were saved by yoga,” she said. “I challenged your yoga, and I would have lost.”
    It was Haldane’s turn to feel hysteria. Sitting beside her, he said, “But, Helix, there wasn’t any yoga. I’m wearing an athletic supporter. I’m under restraint.”
    He was sliding an arm around her waist when she doubled up her fist and began to pound him on the chest, weeping again. “You beast! You crude, deceitful beast. All the time, you let me think it was I. All the time, I was trying to beat yoga…”
    She quit pounding him and dropped her face to her hands, sobbing. Gently he reached over, placed an arm over her shoulders, and reassured her, “Helix, you whipped him to a frazzle.”
    She threw his arm away and jumped to her feet, walked over to a chair, sat down, and glared at him. “Don’t you ever touch me again, you beast.”
    His mind whirled. She was genuinely angry with him because he had obeyed her a moment before, and once he had explained why, she had become angry with him for doing what she had formerly been angry with him for not doing. He threw up his hands in despair. “Helix, let’s look at this matter rationally,” he said, “and forget the eighteenth century. Come back and let me hold your hand, and I’ll apologize for my deceit and my irrational behavior. There are a few other refinements of the ritual which might enlighten you when it comes to writing…”
    She shook her head stubbornly. “No, if it happened once, it would happen again. You’re in love, you nut. Here”—she reached down, picked up the Fairweather biography, and tossed it toward him—“read about your god, you saint of mathematics.”
    “I have no gods. I’m a born loser, and the gods were all triumphant. Jesus, Fairweather, Jehovah, they’re all winners. The only ball team I cheer is the Baltimore Orioles. Only one moment of my life was granted me to look on the face of beauty, and beauty thumbed her nose.”
    She was not listening. Her eyes were looking away and fuming. Her kneecaps, primly touching, pointed away from him.
    He sat mute, Fairweather forgotten on his aching lap.
    Finally, she rose and went into the foyer, looking down on him with haughty coolness, holding herself primly erect and more than an arm’s length from him as she passed, her hips not swaying half an inch from the perpendicular. As she passed into the foyer, her hands swooped over the vase of roses, touching them lightly with a caress of infinite grace.
    She came back into the room carrying a guitar, moving with wariness past the couch where he sat. She resumed her seat in the chair, and the lines of her body relaxed in soft arcs around the instrument. As she hummed a note and struck the strings, she reminded him of a