“I’ll tell you later,” he says, noticing my friend for the first time. “But do hurry back. They’ll miss us both.”

“I’ll be there,” I say.

He walks back to the bar.

“Who was that?” my friend Norris asks.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I was just putting him on.”

“He probably mistook you for somebody else,” says Norris.

“Yeah,” I say. “This is a crazy bar.”

“Wasn’t he gay?” asks Norris.

I think a minute. “He probably was,” I say at last. “There’re more fairies here than in the Brothers Grimm.”

Norris laughs and drinks his beer. I look at mine on the table and see how round and big my face looks reflected in the brown liquid. All at once I do not feel like drinking.

She was a real dog. I really expected her to bark, but she only held out her hand and looked very unhappy to see me. Gerald, of course, was very pleased to introduce us. His date was pretty, with smooth, dark brown skin and a genuine smile, and I could see that Gloria hated him, perhaps not so much for screwing her and then taking out her roommate, as for insinuating in his wide, toothy smiles and sly asides to me, that he was passing her body on to someone who had need of it for a night.

“Watch out for the curves, if you can find them,” Gerald said to me in his most obvious aside. Gloria was watching us as we stood by the door. I knew that she hated both of us.

“God help the dogs,” I said to Gerald, trying, in my own way, to be hip.

He laughed heartily.

“What’s funny?” said Gloria.

“You are,” Gerald said. “You are one funny chick.”

“You know what I think of you,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Gerald. “And you know that I don’t give a good goddamn.”

The odd thing was that they were both smiling, which gave me the feeling that they had long ago arrived at some silent agreement, of which this scene was merely the verbal part.

The roommate came out of her room. She was very pretty, especially when she stood next to Gloria. She was wearing a white miniskirt, which complemented her skin. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gerald watching me watching her and laughing, and knew that he would not introduce me to her.

“Stay cool,” he said, still smiling and taking the roommate out the door. And then the dog and I were alone.

We talked. She was from the South and was ashamed of it. “I left when I was real young,” she said.

We drank. Scotch. Because, she said, that was all she ever drank. “It doesn’t get me drunk,” she said, watching me.

“What sort of music do you like?”