“The kids?”

“No, my fucking wife, almost ex-wife, she’s annoying as hell. Boy, I can’t wait to say that, ex-wife.”

“How annoying is she?” I asked. “I mean, in dollars.”

He paused to regard me as if for the first time. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a professor at Brown.”

Peterman nodded. “I tried to get in there, but I didn’t have the right connections. I’m a URI man.”

“Good school.”

“Yeah, right. Where did you go?”

“Pasadena Community College,” I said.

That made him smile. “I’ve heard that’s a good school, too,” he said, almost smirking. “I hear it’s got a beautiful campus.”

“I don’t know. At least I can’t remember. I was five when I left there to go to Princeton. How many dollars do you want for Audrey?”

“Thirty thousand.”

“Cash okay?”

“What?”

“Will you accept cash?”

“Of course.” Peterman beamed. He was no doubt thinking about his wife.

“There’s just one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?” he said, suspiciously.

“I don’t know how to drive. I’d like you to teach me.”

“Are you kidding me? Did my wife send you here to fuck with me?”

I shook my head no. “I will pay you thirty-five thousand if you also teach me how to use the machine. Do we have a deal?”

“On the level? Machine? Thirty-five thousand dollars. The boys at the club hired you to come over here. Those fuckers.”

“No, no, on the level,” I said, using his language. “I’ll come back tomorrow with the money.”

“Right.”

He didn’t believe me.

“What time would you like me to be here? The bank opens at nine and I can be here at nine thirty. Would you that work for you?”

“Whatever you say,” he said. He dropped his head and walked back to his door. “Fuckers.”

Peterman didn’t come back outside while I stood there looking awhile longer at the lime-green Audrey.

That evening I studied the workings of the internal combustion engine and various transmission designs and read the Rhode Island rules of the roads and highways. It wasn’t called that, but that’s what it was. The brown, white-lettered Roger Williams Park and Zoo sign stuck in my head and for an hour that was all I could see.

I dreamed of empty sets. I had two null sets in front of me, so to speak. One set contained real apples that were not fruits and the other contained married bachelors. Trigo argued in his usual calm way that the sets were equal, stating the obvious truth that neither had any elements and therefore held the same number of elements. I argued that the sets could not possibly be equal because what one set lacked was not the same as what the other set lacked.

“Are you saying, my dear dog Trigo, that a married bachelor is equivalent to an apple that is not a fruit?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,” said Trigo.

“Let me ask you this, is a bachelor a man or a woman?” I asked.