wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments. And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles. In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same recurrent life themes of this man. She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and