“No, reconsider, please. We’ll do it as a Strengthening. Angel Calisthenics. —Okay, myself? I’ll go first. Come Tuesday next, at seven p.m.? at my lovely home? I will perform a new piano piece called ‘The Archangel Gabriel’s Homely Identical Twin: A Tonepoem in Two Parts.’ I’m just winging this, okay? But mine will be based upon the hymns of my wasted Lutheran youth. I’ve told you about my old organ teacher (no comment), his asking me to run upstairs and sit naked in the third-floor pipe-loft and tell him how each low note felt in my … Yeah, I thought I’d bored you all with that. I love hymns even now, don’t you? I mean, ‘Seraphim and Cherubim, Falling Down Before Thee’? That can still make a thinking boy hard.

“Angie? Just one little painting maybe? and why not move more toward the blues instead of your recent burnt sienna earthtones? To see your hands is to know your palette. So what’s your title? What’s Miss Teen Alabama’s idea of Paradise?”

“‘Santa’s Workshop,’” she said. “All I ever wanted for Christmas was the toyshop. Every drippy paintpot, and to have all the little big-dicked elves as my happy slaves.”

I got chillbumps, staring. Had I ever told her this fantasy? No, I’d only thought it, hard. But if anything intense happened recently in my own head, my bed, it seemed to follow direct to hers: My slapdash hope of playing well in a big big room with others, of making bright pure toys alongside those few who were really best at that.

I grabbed a paper napkin. I would try writing out some title grand enough to hold my place here at Ossorio’s round table.

“Hartley Mims the somethingth? I’ll need the name of your story, and I want a draft read aloud by you on Tuesday. I crave your heaven. And I want to like it. And we want to laugh, please, in your haphaphappy-talkin paradise.”

“Mine will be called …”—I read blurred ink from the white napkin’s pulp—“‘Toward a More Precise Identification of the Newer Angels.’”

“You pretentious fairy. You are, like me, destined to rise.” She laughed with pleasure, and leaned right over and kissed me wet. “You fum Mars or wha’?”

“When I make water, I make water. And when I make Paradise, you’ll book ahead. So eat your VD-ridden heart out, Sports Medicine.”

We all now turned toward the pleasing sight of Gideon. Who shrugged. The French! The Arabs! The Sephardics! He got all that world weariness poured into a mere hundred and thirty succulent pounds. Then—to stay safe—sure of its still being reasonably adorable, he showed us his excellent dimples, but only in a demi-smile, in dimple eighth notes.

Gideon said he thought he maybe had one done already. One with gold and blue in it. He said he did not intend to create what anybody ever asked him to, never for money, and certainly not for mere childish sloppy fun. But Gideon might, if he remembered, bring along the small one he had done already. “So.” Robert pretended to write on marble tabletop, ringed with saucer stains.