The Hanged Man's Song

apparently standing next to one of those chintzy, overdecorated French Baroque mirrors, the kind that Georgetown hostesses hang in their hallways. That wouldn’t mean much either—except that Ashcroft didn’t seem to have a reflection.
    I was puzzling over that when LuEllen came back. She smelled good. She must have touched on a perfume counter during her shopping expedition. Coco, maybe. She asked, “Anything new?”
    “More stuff. Take a look at this Ashcroft photograph.”
    She looked, her left breast brushing my ear. She was wearing a silk blouse, and it felt kind of good. After a moment, she stood up, frowning, and said, “He doesn’t have a reflection.”
    “Might be the angle of the shot,” I said.
    “I don’t know. His shoulder’s right against the mirror.”
    “Well, maybe it’s not really a mirror. Or maybe it’s curved and we can’t see it.”
    “Maybe,” she said.
    “Huh.”
    I thought for a few head-scratching minutes that it might be a clue to something in Bobby’s files. Maybe even a clue to the encryption keys. If it was, it was too subtle for me, and I reluctantly decided that it was a joke. At least, I hoped so. No reflection?
    As I finished with the DVDs, LuEllen went to the clothes she’d bought. The motel room door was covered with a large mirror, and she started trying on blouses and slacks. Neither one of us is particularly body-shy and we’d spent enough time rolling around in bed together, on other occasions, when we weren’t involved with third and fourth people, that a little skin shouldn’t have been a big deal; and I’d only drawn maybe three hundred nudes starring LuEllen.
    But that was drawing . . .
    She’s basically a small woman with small breasts and a small butt. She was also wearing a small brassiere, which she really didn’t need, other than as anti-leer protection in convenience stores; but the brassiere sat under her breasts like a couple of daisies, just barely covering her nipples, and her underpants were of the low-cut Jockey variety. And she smelled good.
    She changed blouses and then changed slacks and then changed blouses and into some other slacks, and the perfume was going round and round and I kept looking at more meaningless photographs and I could hear the pants coming off and see the shirts being tossed and I finally turned around and she waslooking at herself in the mirror, posing in a half-open blouse and the underpants, and I shouted, “Jesus Christ, woman,” and threw her on the bed.
    We didn’t get much more done that afternoon. But if LuEllen had been concerned that her brains were becoming overly tight, she no longer had anything to worry about.

Chapter Six
    >>> GETTING YOUR LIFE BACK on track, after an enthusiastic change of direction, isn’t always the easiest thing. There’s guilt, when you reflect on other relationships, and you’re not sure you want to look your partner in the eye. Once you do, you’ll be able to see both that what happened was not a mistake, not an incident, not a fantasy or a dream, but actually, you know, happened  . . . and that there are implications.
    I woke up when I felt LuEllen moving around, turned my head, cracked my eyes. I felt her stretch; and the additional weightand warmth in the bed felt pretty good, even though we’d only been in it for two hours, and it wasn’t even dark yet. Finally, as I watched out of the corner of my eye, she sat up, stretched, and yawned. She hummed. She fluffed herself up. She purred for a while. She said, “You up?”
    I feigned near-sleep. “I guess,” I groaned.
    “We need to get some chocolate in here.” She bounced out of bed and ran around naked, all pink and jiggly. I had the urge to draw her, as I had so many times before, but I knew where that would lead.
    “Let’s do it again,” she said.
    “I’m an old man,” I groaned.
    “Better to wear out than to rust.”
    “Let me brush my teeth . . . but you go first.”
    We did all of that, and what seemed to be a little while later, I looked at the clock: two hours had gone somewhere. “Ah . . . shit.”
    “What?” She was looking at her toes, wiggling them, like little piggies.
    “We gotta call Washington.” I stretched and yawned. “Like right now.”
    “So come on in the shower.”
    “If we get in the shower together, we might not get out of the room in time to make the call,” I said.
    “Naw, come on . . .”
    >>> WE GOT out of the room, eventually, down to the car,