“You could conquer the eastern states,” I said. “With your legs and everything.”

“Probably,” Chloe said. Then, a couple moments later: “Jim’s not a bad guy. He knows what he’s about. He’s not trying to be something else.”

“What would you say he’s ‘about’?” I said.

“Climbing. Working hard,” she said. “You might think he’s kind of full of shit but he’s not. He came all the way out here to follow his passions, you know?”

“I liked him better before I knew you existed,” I said.

Chloe leaned across the couch and rubbed my head. “Aw, it wishes I was single,” she said.

I watched somebody’s black Lab fending off the nipping of a mutt puppy on the floor.

“Maybe when you’re all fixed up we can talk,” she said. “As it is you’d be a sitting duck.”

I went in for the surgery at St. Patrick a week later and it seemed to go all right, though it set me back on the movement front. It was now July and I wouldn’t be able to travel for a few months, so I took a leave of absence from the fall semester back East. After a week at home, I got bored enough to ask the head of the program if I could teach my class from my house and she said yes. Apparently Chris had been “teaching” Vietnam movies while filling in for me and she was already getting emails from parents. So that Tuesday the high schoolers sat cross-legged around my couch and we talked about the photos they’d been taking. There was a lot of the usual—pictures of their feet, some blurry sub–Francesca Woodman mood shots—but there were a couple keepers. One girl had taken a series of pictures with her friends in tourist poses in which she’d deliberately put her finger in front of the lens. Another had taken photos of small children wearing her clothes.

“What do we think this is all about?” I said.

“They’re her inner child?” a guy said.

“Good,” I said.

I sent them home with a handout from Susan Sontag and instructions to take a photo of “some social significance.” That’d keep ’em busy. I felt so good to be teaching again that I invited Chloe and Jim over to smoke and drink beer and watch Buster Keaton movies. Halfway through The Navigator, Jim said he wasn’t interested in silent movies and went off to the bar.

“Be good,” he said. Was this an Arthurian morality test?

“You don’t have to stay,” I said to Chloe. “Buster’ll keep me company.”

“Naw, this is tight,” she said. “Chaplin without the bullshit.”

We smoked a joint and had some more drinks and watched Sherlock Jr. It had gotten late and Jim hadn’t called about picking her up.

“He’s probably just drunk,” Chloe said. “Like me.”