Mine had just been a manner of speaking. “Not ever, it may be, Imogene,” I told her. “I have a week of gigs out west, and then I’m off on this trip, helping keep your planet safe for democracy.”

“But I’ll see you when you come back,” she insisted. “You must come back to Washington, to be debriefed. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie,” she said, as if knowing repetition galled me. “I can’t ever let you go.”

Imogene’s magic essences had dried on my face and I longed for a washcloth and a taxi out of there. “I got a wife, you know. And four little ones.”

“Do you love your wife?”

“Well, honey, I wouldn’t say I don’t, though after fifteen years a little of the bloom rubs off.”

“Do you kiss her between the legs, too?”

This did seem downright forward. “I forget,” I said, and pushed out of the bed into the bathroom, where the switch brought back color into everything, all those pinks and blues and yellows on her medicine shelves; it seemed she needed a lot of pills to keep herself functional.

“Eddie, don’t go,” she pleaded. “Stay the night. It’s not safe out there. It’s so bad the taxis won’t come even if you call.”

“Young lady, I got a hired car coming to the Willard Hotel at seven-thirty tomorrow morning to carry me back to western Virginia, and I’m going to be there. I may not be the future of banjo-picking, but I take a real professional pride in never having missed a date.” Putting on my underwear, I remembered how the taxi had gone around past the railroad station and then the Capitol, all lit up, and I figured we hadn’t gone so far past it I couldn’t steer myself by its tip, or by the spotlights on the Washington Monument.

“Eddie, you can’t go, I won’t let you,” Imogene asserted, out of bed, all but one sweet fat white leg caught in the sheet. Her breasts didn’t look quite so cocky without her holding them up for me. That’s the trouble with a full figure, it ties you to a bra.

I crooned a few lines of “Don’t Say Good-bye If You Love Me,” until my memory ran out, though I could see Jim Buchanan’s face inches across from me, squeezed into its fiddle, at the WWVA microphone. And then I told Imogene, as if still quoting a lyric, “Little darlin’, you ain’t keeping me here, though I must say it was absolute bliss.” This was my third lie, but a white one, and with some truth still in it. “Now, you go save your undying affection for an unattached man.”