“Man has to have tail,” Buchanan is continuing.

“Play, Babe,” a dark voice shouts from a dark booth. Rufe bobs his head and switches on the blue spot. Babe sighs and offers Jill what is left of Skeeter’s joint. Jill shakes her head and gets out of the booth to let Babe out. Rabbit thinks the girl is leaving and discovers himself glad when she sits down again, opposite him. He sips his Stinger and she chews the ice from her lemonade while Babe plays again. This time the boys in the poolroom softly keep at their game. The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the space inside him very big, big enough to hold blue light and black faces and “Honeysuckle Rose” and stale smoke sweeter than alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and forearms are as it were translucent and belonging to another order of creature; she is not yet grown. Her womanliness is attached to her, it floats from her like a little zeppelin he can almost see. And his inside space expands to include beyond Jimbo’s the whole world with its arrowing wars and polychrome races, its continents shaped like ceiling stains, its strings of gravitational attraction attaching it to every star, its glory in space as of a blue marble swirled with clouds; everything is warm, wet, still coming to birth but himself and his home, which remains a strange dry place, dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off space capsule. He doesn’t want to go there but he must. He must. “I must go,” he says, rising.

“Hey, hey,” Buchanan protests. “The night hasn’t even got itself turned around to get started yet.”

“I ought to be home in case my kid can’t stand the kid he’s staying with. I promised I’d visit my parents tomorrow, if they didn’t keep my mother in the hospital for more tests.”

“Babe will be sad, you sneaking out. She took a shine to you.”

“Maybe that other guy she took a shine to will be back. My guess is Babe takes a shine pretty easy.”

“Don’t you get nasty.”

“No, I love her, Jesus. Tell her. She plays like a whiz. This has been a terrific change of pace for me.” He tries to stand, but the table edge confines him to a crouch. The booth tilts and he rocks slightly, as if he is already in the slowly turning cold house he is heading toward. Jill stands up with him, obedient as a mirror.

“One of these times,” Buchanan continues beneath them, “maybe you can get to know Babe better. She is one good egg.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He tells Jill, “Sit down.”

“Aren’t you going to take me with you? They want you to.”

“Gee. I hadn’t thought to.”

She sits down.

“Friend Harry, you’ve hurt the little girl’s feelings. Nasty must be your middle name.”

Jill says, “Far as creeps like this are concerned, I have no feelings. I’ve decided he’s queer anyway.”