“What if this Fourkiller is right?” he asks. “Just as an exercise in giving equal consideration to out-there points of view.

What if the best thing for Turtle is to go back?”

“You mean go back permanently?”

“I think that’s what she means.”

“Isn’t there another path?” Gundi asks. She says pahth, and moves her head in a large, lazy loop so that her light hair slides out of her eyes. Her earrings are made of beads that glitter like small metallic sparks. “The I Ching advises the moderate path,” she says.

“Unfortunately, skin color doesn’t come in ‘moderate.’ It comes in ‘white’ and ‘other.’ ”

“I don’t know about this. When I was a girl in Germany we read a little story in school about the Hopi, and I wanted to grow up to be an Indian. I think that’s why I came here to Arizona, because of unconscious desires. I wanted my paintings to be touched by the primeval spirits of the land.”

On the wall behind her, facing Jax, is a full-length portrait of nude Gundi with a saguaro. She stands in profile, her arms outstretched, so close to the cactus that her chin and other parts of her body appear to be recklessly touching its spines. The painting is more realistic than those in her previous series, which represented the moods of water.

It will sell for more money, too.

“Do you think people like you and me can understand the value of belonging to a tribe?”

She looks at him, tilting her head. “Of course. We all long for connection.”

“What do you want most in the world?” he asks.

“For my paintings to be extraordinary and great,” she says without hesitation.

“And you write your name on every one.”

“Well, I paint it on there. With a fine brush. Yes. Does that make me a bad person?”

“It makes you a solo flyer. Charles Lindbergh aiming for France. Not a group migration of geese.”

“But I don’t make paintings for myself, they are for other people. For the world. I want them to bring the world something more than its ordinary light.”

“But you also want it known that Gundi made that light.”

“Well, I want to get paid for my paintings, sure.”

“Okay,” Jax says, stretching his limbs. “Say I’m a genial millionaire and I will pay you a stellar salary to live on Rancho Copo and paint the great paintings, and donate them benevolently to the universe. Then you wouldn’t sign them?”

“I think I would, still.”

“Why?”

“Because I would want people to know this was the work of Gundi, and it didn’t fall out of the sky.”

“Gundi alone, apart from all other paintbrush-friendly members of the breed.”

“Well, what about you, Jax? Would you perform your music with a…with a grocery sack over your head?”

“I have, as a matter of fact. As a courtesy to my listening public.”

She inclines her head again, smiling. Her beaded earrings struggle in the air like small hooked fish. “Would you like to take a bath?” she asks him. “I have a Japanese tub, four feet deep, you float in it.”

“I don’t float. I sink like a Cadillac.”

Gundi laughs. “No, really, it’s totally relaxing. I’ve used it almost every day since the workmen finished it.” Jax can imagine Gundi kissing each one of these workmen on the day they departed. She stands up, and he finds himself once again following the irresistible gravity of a woman.

The room with the Japanese tub is the deep slick blue of a starless night, entirely tiled except for a tall window that opens onto a westward exposure of empty desert. Gundi sheds her clothes, which seemed only provisional anyway, so it isn’t a big step. Jax follows her example while her back is turned, as she adjusts the steaming water. They sit on opposite sides, waiting for the deep, square hole between them to fill.

Jax with clothes on looks impossibly thin, but without them he is something else, articulated limbs, long and fine without excess. Exactly like his hands. Gundi glances at his legs stretched on the dark blue tile while she attends to the water. The gleaming faucet grows too hot to touch, and she winds her hair around it to protect her hands when she needs to adjust it. She is wearing only earrings and a fine gold chain around her left ankle.

“It’s a lot of water,” Jax says, looking out the window at dry mesquites and one lone saguaro, its arms raised in surprise or invocation. “Don’t you feel guilty, with all those thirsty plants staring in at you?”