She felt tired and overrun and, reaching over in her woolen blanket she held me first, in the girth of her hollow hand, under the heaps of fabric. It is a funny thing how easy it is to hold a man, if you are a woman. I turned in open view to kiss her on the cheek. 

And as I did so, in the open and  the cold we seemed Caught already. Just like me, to get caught. Jack frost seemed to announce it. I might as well have been caught with my pants down in his icy blast. What had happened could not be erased from public vision. It was that kiss on the couch. That was how it happened. The little minnow of a boy, Circus Charlie - half Chinese and half American - said to me straight afterwards. "You kissed her on the cheek" just after I'd tried to talk myself out of the story that was clear and present somehow. 

Signed and sealed were her divorce and my impending obfuscade as a lover was in its infancy, almost as a kind of judgment. She told me in the tent. The tent was full of longing and brokenness and all I could do was announce my undying love to her. Life is tragic. 

We went to far away China as we'd learned to do in dreams. So far I had not been there. 

But it was familiar somehow; the squalor and her lack of heart to anything good. The tawdry air of hollywoodesque pleasures. 

She'd reverted, now. Now she was in my arms. No longer a convert. She wanted the rugged life of an outcast. 

It was raw and it was rife. They were in the miasma of dance-halls - her and her friend. And hour by hour she was turning more pink, more European. When we came back to make love, the place had exploded and the Owner was there feeling that he was owed an explanation. These odd Chinese candles, apparently, weren't meant to be left burning. Flat and combustion-ridden as they were. 

That was when I put on my act. Started off in a smart little way. Started explaining that I studied Postmodernism, and not what he thought I had - which was some nonsense subject. 

That changed him. The pink wax on the curtains didn't seem to matter anymore. He was done with us, and went off to his quarters. 

Then I turned to my new lover to make love, but expectations cast in the light of doom, and of embarrassment seldom come to pass. 

She just wanted to eat now. It was pizza for dinner on the tiny wooden stand of a table. 

That was our first night together. I could leave at any time, I realized.