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along on our photo excursions. The idea of making love al fresco was suddenly to be discussed. He was likable, possibly because he liked his subject, which was everything, oneself included. To some extent I was responsible for the direction things took, but it was my duty to point out that outdoor love was not a good idea. I explained about dispersed settlement patterns in Botswana, that what looked like blank veld could erupt with boys herding cows or goats right past you, how there could be homesteads or cattle posts functioning in the midst of spectacular desolation, miles from anything. I also knew of two anthropologists working out of Kanye who were cataloging stone age settlement sites, which could be anywhere. He got it. He was not an aggressive man and the question went away, leaving an undertone in our outings that was to my advantage. Pastoral sex is exclusively a male penchant. I guarantee no woman ever proposes it if there are quarters available. Even Denoon had a vestige of a tendency in that direction until I mused pointedly a couple of times that the tendency must have something to do with exhibitionism.
    I had an objective where Giles was concerned. He had an assignment pending in Victoria Falls, which I was in danger of never seeing before I left Africa. I not only wanted to get to Victoria Falls but to stay there in splendor at the Vic Falls Hotel, the way the colonial exploiters had. This was less greed per se than it was wanting to visit or inhabit a particularly gorgeous and egregious consummation of it. I was convinced that under Mugabe accommodations would be democratized and establishments like the Vic Falls Hotel would cease to exist, which of course was only one of a number of things that didn’t happen under Mugabe. I had a fixation on seeing the greatest natural feature in Africa and seeing it atthe maximal time of year, which was just then, when the Zambezi was still in spate. I might be going back home to exile in the academic tundra, but I wanted to have seen the world’s greatest waterfall from the windows of an establishment amounting to a wet dream of doomed white settler amour propre.
    I teased Giles to this end. I’m against what I did. I didn’t enjoy doing it. A utopia I would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it’s a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear. Everyone raved about Victoria Falls and in fact I was right to want to go there.
    For his postcard project Giles wanted bucolica—happy faces in rural places, as he put it—but he did point his camera my way now and then when the mood struck him. He decided I was a good subject. Would I let him do some indoor studies in his suite at the President Hotel? His promo was that shooting me indoors would be clever because I was so plainly an outdoor type. He had some ideas about how to exploit that, involving some props he had, antique veils and fans. There must be a term for the faint whining sound the fingers produce as they slide down the strings of a guitar to make a chord lower on the neck. I heard the equivalent in his voice. I agreed on condition he not buy me dinner first, just as a genuflection toward professionalism.
    I arrived about eight one evening. All was in readiness: the photo-floods, the reflectors. He thought it would be helpful if we each had a touch of brandy. He had been married twice, each time to a flawless woman, if their photographs were to be trusted. One of them was Thai. The pictures of his exes were propaganda: who were you to resist a man who had won such human gems? Denoon once said that if Martians conquered the earth and ran an ethnic beauty contest to decide who should be given control of the planet on the basis of sheer beauty, it would go to Thai women and Cretan men. I remember I said Speaking for my fellow