My parents still work as a tag team. First one gets you around the legs, then the other piles on.

“Some. Robert gave us an assignment six months back. To try and figure out our own idea of Paradise. I called mine ‘Toward a More Precise Identification of the Newer Angels.’* I imagined how new angels might get recognized by older ones. But no magazine’ll touch the piece. Maybe it seems strange, coming in without a context. I brought it with me, figured maybe to reread it on the plane home. I think it’s good—But, writing? Less than I’d like. I guess it’ll be there. I certainly won’t lack for experience, will I? But right now, my book feels like less of an emergency … than this other.”

“Earning a living is always an emergency, son.”

“Fine sunset you got going here.” I take the coward’s way out. I haven’t the grit for a brawl tonight. Not while feeling this beat, not after his star-search for our Buick.

“Howbout another drink, kids? Anybody else?” I dash to their club-worthy wet bar, its bent chrome faucet, green marbletop—the niche, our local altar to that favored Episcopal household god: a full undiscounted bottle of the very best.

I study sky. My folks remark on today’s postcard sunset. Their lake doubles its lurid beauty. Large waterbirds are flying over in blackest silhouette. Dad compares this sunset unfavorably to the one in October: “Less yellow tonight, purpler south-southwest.”

“Aha,” I respond, nursing further bourbon.

Dad explains how that one in October was truly “a red-letter day … literally, come to think of it!” Then he laughs toward more ragged laughing unto coughing into redfaced shock. I know this. Mom, fighting for the casual, smiles, pats his back. He lifts his right arm, now his left. Poor guy’s lungs are shot. Fibrosis. It killed his father; it recently killed his older brother.

Dad chain-smoked during WW II and most of the fifties. After one of his hacking spasms, I, concerned, once asked about those Chesterfields’ effect on his wind. He only blinked; told me he had no idea what I was talking about, and why had I been born such a goddamn pessimist? That shut me up. Was I unconsciously gloating?

I need a third drink. Or would this might would be maybe make the four, fourth? They watch me, their eyes look light if concerned as I chat toward their bar again. I’m blathering too much about New York, non-plague art-world gossip of no interest to them; but I can think of nothing else to say; inwardly I panic at their lack of ice. I find it hard to believe my intelligent father could misplace his whole car; I find it easier to forget. I start again to understand my mother’s plight. Some life sentence, a “happy” marriage.