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yourself when you are with me. In this sense I am not a seducer. I am hardly seen. I won’t speak untruths to you, I won’t pass easy compliments or odious offerings of flattery. I make do with on-hand materials, what I can chip out of you, your natural ore. Then I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity.

I should have warned my American wife.
    I met Lelia at a party given by an acquaintance of mine from college, a minor painter of landscapes. I bumped into him by pure chance in a trinket shop in El Paso. I was in the city on assignment, only my second one solo, and I’d just completed the job. It had been successful, but I was still jittery, the way you feel after a massive release of energy, my nerves on end and still working. I was planning to fly out that evening, but he invited me to a gathering of some of his artist-and-crafter friends and I decided to stay until the next morning.
    That evening I went to his living loft and studio, which was on the second floor of a run-down hacienda in an old section of town. The party was crowded, mostly candlelit, the talk unfiltered, unwinding all over the single large room. People were sitting in groups on oversized floor pillows and on cane chairs turned backward, smoking grass and drinking tall-neck beers. Nils—the painter—greeted me in the open kitchen.
    â€œMy good friend Henry,” he said stridently, the strangeness of that notion hanging there for us.
    I simply took his hand. He had a woman with him, or next to him, and he introduced us. She said hello to me and her voice surprised me with its pitch, clearer and higher than I was hearing those days. The women I knew back in New York grumbled from down low in the gut, in messy plaints, everything spoken in 2 A.M. arias.
    It ended up that Lelia was the only person I spoke with. In fact Nils seemed to want us to talk, if only to keep her occupied while he entertained the other guests. He was probably figuring I wouldn’t get in the way. He didn’t say as much, they weren’t lovers, but I could tell he desired her, the way he was ushering her around with his paint-splattered hand clinging to the small of her back. Make a gesture, he must have thought, let my Asian friend in the suit have a pleasant moment with her.
    She was wearing a sand-hued wrap, a kind of sari, except it was looser than that, as if it had just been unwound and then only casually repinned. One shoulder was bared. I noticed she was very white, the skin of her shoulder almost blue, opalescent, unbelievably pale considering where she lived. When he left us she bid him goodbye using his surname, with neither irony nor derision. Then she told me to wait and she left. She came back after a few minutes with two beers pressed against her chest and a bowl of tortilla chips in her free hand. I took the bottles from her. They left winged damp marks on her wrap, which she didn’t seem to notice. She led us to an open double window at the quieter end of the studio. She balanced the bowl on the wide sill and said to me, “I saw you right away when you came in.”
    â€œDid I look that uncomfortable?”
    â€œTerribly,” she said. “You kept pulling at your tie and then tightening it back up. I saw a little kid in a hot church.”
    â€œI’m usually better at parties,” I told her.
    â€œI’m usually worse,” she said. “I guess tonight I feel social.”
    We clinked bottles.
    She was looking at me closely, maybe wondering what a last name like Park meant ethnically. After a while our talk came ’round to it, so I told her.
    â€œI knew,” she said. “Or I was pretty sure. A friend in middle school taught me about Korean names, how Park and Kim were always Korean, the other names like Chung and Cho and Lee maybe Korean, maybe Chinese. Never Japanese. Am I getting this right?”
    â€œYou’re getting this right.”
    â€œAren’t you going to guess what