"Little Americans flirts," to quote Henry James, "[are] the queerest creatures in the world."

Taylor talked me into going out. This is strange, because he never wants to go out. He's not a very outgoing personality. But, he'd just come from Germany. I hadn't seen him in a long time. Who knows, people change.

On the way out of a hookah bar, we asked some German kids for directions. They ended up taking us out to a skeezy college bar aimed at exchange students: mostly Americans, a few Spaniards, and the obligatory Japanese. The few locals are composed of bored college boys, looking to find, fuck, and forget whatever foreign co-ed drunk enough for temporary absolution from her boyfriend back home (because they all have one, whether they admit it or not). Some are sixteen, living with Catholic families who ask, perched around the dinner table, eyebrows raised: "Are you going out again tonight?" These little American flirts talk about Martha's Vineyard, their beach house on Padre Island, or the Hamptons. They gasp when they see hashish or rutting couples in brightly lit corners across the street. They forget to wear jackets when it is 12 C and then cuddle close to you. You stroke their hair and wonder, "When are my children going to do this?"

Taylor attempted to talk to the girl from Martinique, a breathtaking specimen of the beauty colonial France stole long ago. The girl to my right sat on a stool. Her hair is a wondrous mess that Nate Wainscott would envy. This girl and Nate also have similar taste in jeans. Skinny, low cut black ones that show off one's thin figure. Her robin's egg cardigan has a little Lacoste alligator on it.

"J'mapelle Lilly" she says, and it's a lie. I correct her Spanish (which is better than my French) and she makes me hold her handbag. Outside for a smoke she says, "Mi novio, my boyfriend, esta a le Boule, la playa. He leave me here." She hands me the cigarette. "Are you married?" she asks.

"Pff...no, not yet," I say. When the bar closes and everyone is leaving she grabs my hand and leads me to the now-empty brightly lit back room and kisses me. Buddha on the wall looks down.

"Tomorrow. You call me." She writes her number on my map before turning and going off into the night, surrounded by friends.

The next day Taylor and I do yoga in the park.
"She's married, man. And her name's totally not 'Lilly.' It's Tiphane."
I call her anyway.

"You come to my house at 4:30," she says.
"5:30."
"No, 4:30."
"5."
"Okay, fife. Bring your guitar. Bisous."
I show up at 4:30 to prove my point.
"Mentiroso! [Liar!]" she scolds me when I show up. She's from Lyon and twenty-two years old. Her mother is Sicilian and her father is French. Tiphane moved here and bored with this town already. Her house is the size of the apartment building my parents live in. Green leather salon furniture, two hundred years old, pointed at a large, black, shiny flat screen T.V.

Out in the garden sitting on a bench, I play a song I wrote with none other than Salvatore Cassato himself. It's a blues shuffle in A, from a cold night in Chicago and a hot bottle of sake. It goes like this:

I'm good to you.
You're good to me.
You say you love somebody else
but he don't make you happy.
He don't treat you the way he should,
so I'm wood.

I been to the East.
I been to the West.
I had all the kinds of lovin'
that a man could get,
but your kind of lovin'
was the best.

Now up in the mornin'
at the break of day,
you're huggin the pillow
where my body used to lay.
And if he only knew the way you thrill me,
why, he'd kill me.

I ain't gonna fight.
He ain't got the might.
I can satisfy.
He can't even try.
You got your love stoked up so good,
He'll just get hot,
but I'm wood.

Then I played Chopin's Mazurka in D minor on the piano. She liked it a lot. Practically purring as loudly as the fat Siamese I was petting, Tiphane ordered me to play more. I refused. "I haven't practiced in five years," I said. She gave me a pout, a Mars bar, and a kiss goodbye.

"Going back in a flash over the women I've known. It's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other." Henry Miller.

Portugal is in two days.