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39 One Week before the Vasectomy, We Stay in the Panama Hotel Bed & Breakfast in a Room Called Cole’s Dollhouse We’d booked the bordello-themed room’s red sheets, its maroon throw, its three beaded lampshades amber and glassy as wounds. We’d slept there before, traced the racy desk of mahogany—its forties pinup girls sprawled on old postcards under plexiglass. We’d wrapped ourselves in velvet. This time, someone’s scrawled the wrong room in the reservation book. Another couple’s there, we learn, all weekend. We take the staircase to the top floor of the Victorian, open the door of the room called Cole’s Dollhouse. You uncork a dry white between mint-green walls, between rows of bisque-head French dolls arranged on shelves above the bed. They rim the windowsills in their dim petticoats, sit in a wicker boat across from the claw-foot tub. Their blondeness quivers and curls from a lost century: flower girl with an armful of redbud, one woman whose chest is a pincushion to her hips, a baby doll’s lips parted as if to speak. I can’t 40 drink enough wine to make their blue stares stop. Half nude, you sneak into the hallway, return with extra towels. As I help you drape the dolls into sleep, my wrist hits a shelf, shakes a whole row of mohair eyelashes—their bristles set flapping, the shivered pupils rattle and skew. The dust, unsettled, sends its golden motes through the room and swirls as if trying to find any form to stick to. ...

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