“You’re the prose man. What’s a word for ‘inconstant’?” she asked, stretching her long legs, in the turquoise pedal pushers, down the length of the white sofa. The tunic she wore over them, showing her cleavage almost all the way down to her navel, was the same white as the sofa. I assumed she’d stay on the sofa as much as possible while the New Zealand author was here—it highlighted her very nice set of tits. I also assumed that the author, invited by her English Department at Columbia, where she taught poetry, had impressed her with more than his best-seller status. Otherwise she’d have worn an Indian caftan. Before she’d wafted off to his lecture, she’d asked me if New Zealand was somewhere near India. Since the visiting New Delhi University professor, Vijay Modi, fucked her on his desk during an office party, she’d been in her Indian period.

“Fickle? Vacillating? Spasmodic? Fluid?” I tossed out from the other side of the kitchen bar while I was tossing the salad. I did most of the cooking. Her friends tittered behind their fans that she had acquired me, as a boy toy, when I had taken one of her classes as a graduate student, but I knew that what she’d needed was a maid. No, more than that. What was a nine-letter word for a convenient husband? Camouflage. That was it. She liked men and women, a variety of them. I liked men, but for a room over my head and food on the table, I occasionally fucked Sandra. She didn’t mind, which I took as a vote of confidence in my skills with women as well as men, because she’d been fucked by a whole lot of both. It had been a convenient—camouflage—marriage for both of us. “Does it give any clue?” I called out.

“It’s ten letters,” she answered.

“Oh, of course,” I responded. “Capricious.”

“Yes, that fits,” she said.

It certainly would, I thought. And then the bell from the street rang, there was heavy trudging on the stairs, and the New Zealand best-selling author, Bram Overby, was in the frame of the entry door. The trudge wasn’t because he was fat. It was because he was large, a hunk, in fact. He lit up the room with his smile and his ruddy rugby star looks, his broad shoulders, full chest, and biceps—and lips for that matter. He was carrying a large bouquet of flowers, which I knew weren’t for me no matter how I ached that they would be. And from how outrageously Sandra was fawning over him, I knew that they would fuck—that they’d fuck again, actually. He’d been here a couple of weeks, so I assumed they’d already fucked. I expected Sandra to move out of her Indian phase as soon as she had time to research the lifestyles of New Zealand.