“You’re a louse. Your whole head is sick.”

“Fuck you,” he said, and with that brief exchange, something ugly and evil passed between us. His mark on her was the brand of possession; by challenging it I had made for the first time in my rather uneventful life an unallayed enemy. I wanted to kill him, to scalp the lemon-colored hair from his skull, to flatten his perfect nose until it split at the seams and bloodied his face, but most of all I wanted to cornute that sadistic bastard, whose meanness was in double figures.

He said, “Look, kid, you’re not wanted. Why don’t you go to bed like a good little boy?” It was to my knowledge the most elaborate outpouring of words he had ever managed to string together.

Valerie said, “He’s got as much right here as anybody.”

He looked at her with grim censure.

“Fuck him,” he said again, and thickly, “fuck you too.”

“That’s enough!” Grady lowered his newspaper. And then gravely, almost courteously, he added, “You two have renewed my faith in juvenile churlishness.”

Derek chose not to meet his gaze. He scrambled to his feet, upsetting the checkerboard, and stormed out of the room. Hopelessly, Val looked after him. Grady said, “Don’t worry. He’ll be back.” Altogether I considered the episode a promising, an enriching, experience.

But not for long, for back he was, within a week, he and Valerie going off together, disappearing in the woods, in the back of the car, wherever, while Abby and I, like two abandoned lepers, were left to our own resources.

Our conversations at first were merely courteous, the static of politeness. Never more than muted, they would at times drift off and fade altogether, like a bad telephone connection. He’d look out the window, waiting for Val to turn up even while we were talking, his voice with me while his thoughts hovered over the woods or the car or wherever he thought she might be. So we sloughed through the swampy, extended silences until once again we’d pick up the wayward dialogue. We seemed to agree on any number of subjects I didn’t care much about, and I had the feeling that Abby didn’t either. We had become entangled in each other, a couple of alien twigs grafted to Valerie’s disregard.

When the fruits of our rhetoric withered and died altogether we played tennis, badly, which in that foul climate had the salutary effect of a cold shower, that classic cure for satyriasis. Until the day I slammed a ball over the raggedy green canvas that enclosed the court and in retrieving it found Chatterton slouched on his chrome and plastic throne like some noxious growth out of nature’s own garden.