“No kidding, she is my wife.”

“Must be on honeymoon straight from haah school.”

“Oh, this.” Rabbit looks down at his peppermint-and-cream Mt. Judge athletic jacket, and fights the creeping return of his blush. “I haven’t worn this for I don’t know how many years.”

“Looks to almost fit,” the man says, tapping the blank space for the plate number. “Ah’m in no hurry if you’re not,” he says.

Harry goes to the show window of the little house and studies the license plate and signals for Janice to show the suitcase. He lifts an imaginary suitcase up and down by the handle and she doesn’t understand. Janice sits in their Falcon, mottled and dimmed by window reflections. He pantomimes unpacking; he draws a rectangle in the air; he exclaims, “God, she’s dumb!” and she belatedly understands, reaching back and lifting the bag into view through the layers of glass between them. The man nods; Harry writes his plate number (U20–692) on the card and is given a numbered key (17). “Toward the back,” the man says, “more quaat away from the road.”

“I don’t care if it’s quiet, we’re just going to sleep,” Rabbit says; key in hand, he bursts into friendliness. “Where’re you from, Texas? I was stationed there with the Army once, Fort Larson, near Lubbock.”

The man inserts the card into a rack, looking through the lower half of his bifocals, and clucks his tongue. “You ever get up around Santa Fe?”

“Nope. Never. Sorry I didn’t.”

“That’s my idea of a goood place,” the man tells him.

“I’d like to go someday. I really would. Probably never will, though.”

“Don’t say that, young buck like you, and your cute little lady.”

“I’m not so young.”

“You’re yungg,” the man absentmindedly insists, and this is so nice of him, this and handing over the key, people are so nice generally, that Janice asks Harry as he gets back into the car what he’s grinning about. “And what took so long?”

“We were talking about Santa Fe. He advised us to go.”

The door numbered 17 gives on a room surprisingly long, narrow but long. The carpet is purple, and bits of backlit cardboard here and there undercut the sense of substance, as in a movie lobby. A fantasy world. The bathroom is at the far end, the walls are of cement-block painted rose, imitation oils of the ocean are trying to adorn them, two queen-sized beds look across the narrow room at a television set. Rabbit takes off his shoes and turns on the set and gets on one bed. A band of light appears, expands, jogs itself out of diagonal twitching stripes into The Dating Game. A colored girl from Philly is trying to decide which of three men to take her out on a date; one man is black, another is white, the third is yellow. The color is such that the Chinese man is orange and the colored girl looks bluish. The reception has a ghost so that when she laughs there are many, many teeth. Janice turns it off. Like him she is in stocking feet. They are burglars. He protests, “Hey. That was interesting. She couldn’t see them behind that screen so she’d have to tell from their voices what color they were. If she cared.”