An hour later I make it to the ballroom, but nobody's naked yet.

"Where have you been?" asks Annie.

"Oh, I was just enjoying the view up there too much to come down."

Jack laughs. "As if."

They're all discussing today's question on the chalkboard. "Where does the white go when the snow melts?"

I sigh. When you've been a journalist for twenty years you just know too many things, even things you'd rather not, and there's not a lot of magic left in the world.

Last night's koan was "Does any snowflake ever fall in an inappropriate place?" I hear enough of these things and it starts sounding like Yogi Berra saying things like "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up somewhere else." Baseball's easily got as much crazy-wisdom as all this Zen stuff.

Nita de Los Reyes, one of the seminar leaders, gets up and talks about snow. I'm sure this is related to sex somehow. Hopefully soon. I'd much prefer to think of anything hot rather than the snowbank I was just in.

"Get comfortable while Nita starts us off," Nita's partner Ruby says. These two seem like one of those couples who must have been born together, or met shortly after birth, the kind of couple you try to avoid unless you're madly in love yourself. Annie, whose kids go to school with their kids, is crazy about both of them.

I look around. It seems to me that "comfortable" has a lot of definitions. Some people are wearing sweats, some strip down, some just look nervous. Nita is jazzing about snowflakes and I can't help but notice that the woman wears two gold snowflake earrings pierced in each ear. I wonder what her fetish might be.

"Each of us is going to capture their own unique experience in this session," Nita says. "This afternoon we will work on touching, honoring our inner man and inner woman, and rediscovering our senses one at a time."

Annie sits back between my legs and sighs with pleasure. She has something new on to make me pay attention today, a little white and blue frilly thing that covers as much of her body as a swimsuit does, but I swear it's not the same. My inner man knows what it wants from her.

I touch Annie's shoulders. They are freckled and strong and sometimes it is enough to just touch them when she's wearing one of her sexy summer dresses. But this class may be tough for me. My grandparents came from Russia, a country that never even had a word for "sex" before they adopted the American word in this century, because they believed in showing, not telling, and in privacy. I've always believed that peoples' sex lives should not be discussed in the office, on the streets, and God knows, not in the newspaper.

Annie moves back against my belly and pulls my arms around her to hold her tight and I change my mind. Stupid and easy, that's me. Just the scent of her hair can make me hard. Why not do this for her? I will act as if it is quite possible that someone can teach me better ways to have sex.

"We're going to pass out some equipment," Nita says up in front. "There are small bags of honey dust with a feather-brush for each couple and one of these black satin blindfolds."

What did my grandparents know? They were pretty old anyway. Maybe they would have been right here beside me on the carpet if they lived in the nineties, brushing and touching and making up new words for sex as they went, perfect words, dozens of words for sex like the Eskimos are supposed to have for snow.

My hands are over the white lace on Annie's breasts and I'd swear she slid them there. I have wanted to own Annie since the day that I met her—control her, surprise her, delight her, keep her laughing and sexy and hot—and most days I think I do, but just before dawn sometimes it occurs to me that I know who owns whom. There can be no limits here. This is what I want, this is what I need, this may be what will save me—to sit in a room skin to skin with beautiful Annie and begin to learn again.

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