He shrugged. “I’ll go on trying to keep the old wreck afloat.” So he was still hell-bent on hatching his hippogriff. “The subject, however, is you,” he said. “Your plans.”

“I don’t have any. At this point, I don’t really expect things to go well for me.”

“You’re behaving badly.” He snorted. “Pull up your socks and get on with it. You’re a secondary talent of a fairly high order. You should be able to mesh tractably with something.”

Just what I needed. Positive reinforcement from the dugong. I winced perceptibly.

“It hurts?” he asked with more feeling than I thought him capable of.

“I don’t seem to mesh with anything. Or anybody.”

“You could,” he said, “but your carnality seems to have blocked your intelligence. I refer,” he added soberly, “to Valerie.”

“Valerie?” I blinked at him with wronged innocence.

“Your adorata,” he nodded. “Certainly you remember?”

Another impeachment I should have been quick to deny. Instead I heard myself say, “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

“Everybody noticed. You were absolutely sock-eyed about her.” He thought for a moment. “Her problem,” he went on, “she’s too tractable. Her brain power—it’s difficult for a father to admit—can be mercifully described as inadequate.”

“That’s not true,” I said staunchly. “It’s just she has an uncluttered mind.”

“There’s nothing in it. But there will be someday, I think. She has the earmarks of a late bloomer. Perhaps the same might be said of you. Tell me,” he said, retrogressing to the old nastiness, “has she enriched your life, the little backbreaker? Your six months with her weren’t exactly a priceless memory? And what about your six months on the tuba? Did you even once manage to get a wiggle out of your block? Whatever skills you possess, you flunked harmonics cold.”

“I gave it my best.”

“Not good enough.”

“You’re being unkind.”

“Never to you. I took you in, gave you food and shelter, listened to your inflexibly jejune absurdities, opened your window of opportunity, and you slammed it shut on my fingers. Nonetheless,” he glowered at me, “Grady, for whatever reason, has taken a liking to you. He has asked my permission to allow him to buy you a plane ticket, one way to wherever. And I have granted it.”

“That’s very kind of him,” I said, and quickly added, “and of you.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I have a nature soft and warm as swansdown, if one cares to dig for it. And you never can tell, I might call on you for repayment, with interest, when like Antaeus you rise from the earth, renewed after your fall.”

Now I was falling, the sky was falling, as the plane plunged earthward. Would I be renewed like Antaeus at the bosom of his mom, or was I in for another premature midlife crisis?