Mario's first romantic experience: the tripod hunt, the sumac seduction, the tickle escape — and the tripod found after all

pivotal · mid-Oct YDAU, ~1900h dusk

• When: mid-Oct YDAU, @ 1900h, "not yet true twilight," on and off the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside tree-line.
• What: On a post-prandial stroll Hal melts away for what turn out to be "fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines," leaving Mario tottering tree to tree — until Millicent Kent heaves out of the thickets (staff-ordered weight-management stroll, Penn 5's squeezed in both hands, the violet bow taped or glued to the pill-shaped hair). She reports the strangest thing: a new Husky VI-brand telescoping tripod, dully silvery, set up on its three legs in the middle of a bramble thicket for no reason, no footprints but her own — and takes Mario's claw to go re-find it, get his feedback, and have a witness. Leading him in "slightly diminishing circles" as the light dies, she pours out the whole life story of event 1; Mario, for his part, keeps up a patter of tripod model-specs and compliments on the bow. Then, in an unprickly thicket of what later turns out to be poison sumac, she stops, crushes his head to the area just below her breasts, and confesses that his eyelashes and police-lock vest have long driven her "right around the bend with sensual feeling" — the sudden cold Mario feels being, the narration deadpans, her arousal sucking energy out of the ambient air. She wrestles with the vest's snaps and forces a hand down inside, "rooting for a penis" — and hits the hyper-ticklish zone at and below his navel. Mario doubles up laughing in his distinctive high pitch, and Hal beelines right onto them. The scene's coda pays the pretext off: walking back up the hillside in the dark, not even trying, the three of them stumble on the tripod — real, glinting, in a thicket not so very tall or thick at all.