When he told her he was leaving, she couldn't stop crying. "Things are different now," he explained. "So stop already with the waterworks." He sighed, scooping their goldfish into a tiny net. "I always said you were a girl whose eyes were too near her bladder."

And she couldn't stop crying.

She flopped on her sea-blue futon and wept till the cushions were quite soaked through, and then she got up and took off all her damp clothes and wrung them out in the sink.

Streaming tears smudged mascara. The sad girl in the mirror looked like a startled raccoon. That doleful reflection only caused her to weep the more.

She usually did her important crying in the bath, so she climbed in. It was a claw tub and she was a damp paw.  She didn't have the strength to turn the tap, dripping enough all by herself, a leaky loveless faucet. She sat sobbing for hours or days till the tub was brimful with her tears. The salt lake rose to her lips and overflowed the sides, waterfalling on the tiles below, soaking them slippery green. That pounding at the door would be a neighbor, concerned about the lachrymose Niagara pouring through the ceiling cracks. She was so ashamed, and embarrassment always made her cry, and soon it was a flood, a deluge of biblical proportions. But no smooching pairs on this bathtub ark: no, she was marooned all alone, naked in a white cup, and she couldn't stop crying until her bathtub detached and floated, unmoored, adrift on a limpid tear-stream, scooting away down a river melancholic, across a dead sea of dejection, into the bluest ocean that ever was.

She couldn't stop crying, and tears came in waves and made them, too-a tsunami of grief lifting her aloft and drowning the dry earth in the wet of her till she was downcast at last, sodden surfer of sad, upon a hot-red desert whose parching sands absorbed all that water and became at once fertile, everywhere pollen-thick flowers blooming, yellows and greens and purples bursting along sandbars, oh, and the dune-splashed heavy stamens there!

"You have to stop crying," the Bedouin said, hoisting her naked and sopping out the bathtub. Good thing she'd always had that weird Valentino fetish.

She ambled sidesaddle dromedary across the freshly pastoral dunes, lovely in the night, one blue drop of thunder in a sago sky, till he set her down by one of the palm-shaded oases she'd made, trees luxuriating like bergamot orange gel, and it was there, tussore-sheathed, that she drank sugar-rose water and lip-sipped Koh-i-noor candies and tongued sweetest rahat lacoum till she felt quite rehydrated. And he held her close then, saying, "Things are different now," and wrapping her in his white silk robes, made love to her, and was so skilled that, ecstatic, she couldn't help but cry out and, in the throes of such passion, found she couldn't stop crying.