“But ‘Tom,’ you see, Hartley, had the sense to do a factory recall on himself. Of himself. Recalled himself Tennessee Williams. He actually spent more time in Missouri. But … preferred the other’s sound. So I figured, being a Williams and his halfassed kin some way, I would join him. It’s true I come from Georgia but that’s already a woman’s name. No fun there. Besides, Georgia O’Keeffe beat me to it. She’s a sentimentalist, but a cagey one. Knows how to crop the image of a pebble, like some good photographer would. Her work reproduces better than it ever looks in person. Get up close, you see that paint’s just a means-to-an-end with her. And ‘South Carolina’ seemed a mouthful, besides I hate double Southern names for Sweet Briar belles like me. Which left me only Mississippi (which I was absent when the others learned to spell). So Alabama Byrnes it is.”

“Has a sort of Sherman’s forced march feel to it—I see torches, mansions. And it does sound male. ‘Gary Cooper is Alabama Byrnes.’ Has a sort of macho violence about it.”

“Male. Good. Scorched earth. What every girl who stands just five foot six needs—name that sounds like some dude with a twelve-inch dick, going on before …” We broke into “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” I knew the most verses.

Finally she retired this subject, and kicked the loaded trap under her paint cabinet. “I do hope a person can become what she calls herself,” Angie said, husky, sober. “I reckon we become whatever it is we play at hardest. Take a wimp like Thomas Lanier Williams. He would never even attempt to write a work as ferocious as Streetcar Named Desire. Only a Tennessee Williams could. See, Hartley? I call that self-knowledge. Which is your Alabama’s favorite form of self-defense.”

“And public relations.”

“And public relations. Let’s us go eat.”

Robert, Darling

t’d be wrong to say we two competed for him. Instead, especially when he was out of town, we sat at Ossorio’s and made tireless catalogues of R.’s merits. How his eyelashes, caught by a peculiar late-day rosy light off the Hudson, glinted like silver. We anatomized his hard herbal smell. I said it resembled crushed geranium leaves; she cited nutmeg cut with fresh basil. We once tried writing down his better-known conquests but soon gave up, very hurt. We’d both caught him climbing out of some limo three blocks from here. That way it’d seem he had come home by subway like the rest of us. We said how, on the aristocratic scale of blondness, yellowblond is country tawdry; silverblonds alone truly reign.

Sometimes he’d disappear for ten whole days. No advance warning. Ten. It drove us crazy; his answering machine would be off, too. We considered phoning the cops, but a quick visit to his place showed no signs of struggle.