“Who’s Jewels?” I asked, just to keep him conscious.

“Nobody.”

“A friend? A toss?”

“Neither of those. Or not so’s I committed to memory.”

We were by a grove of banyans, yucca, drooping St. Agnes bushes.

Cozying up to the cemetery was a business line of gravestones with mirrory marble surfaces.

Raf pointed the glowing end of his cigarette at them. “Soon,” he said. “My face and numbers, going right there.”

“No. You’ve been having one long party, is all,” I said.

“I missed you,” he said. “Genuinely did. You know, someplace, not too many cities back . . . Somewhere I was at a zoo.”

I said, “Then what happened? They let you out?”

“Just listen. I’m serious. They had a . . . Not a cage, but a glass room . . . tiny. For this cheetah. She was sleeping in there with this rawhide bone—great big, femur-sized. Laid out, sleeping on the cement floor with her paws up under her chin. Finest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop thinking about it. My mind just goes there and stays.”

I took a swallow from Raf’s silver flask and got hot straight bourbon, an eye crosser.

“You wanted to get inside the room and play with the cat?”

“No, no, just watching her sleep. She was twitching, her eyes moving, like she was having a dream. Feet flexing. Dreaming of hunting probably. You should’ve seen it.”

“How do you like Houston, Raf?”

He backhanded his jaw, making a brushing sound on his rough cheek. He took a second to think. He said, “Well, Paige, I don’t like Houston.”

“Because I have to go,” I said. “Have to leave day after tomorrow. I was hoping you’d go back with me.”

He pounded his clenched fist a couple times on the dash. “Well, probably should, but . . . you know me, how it goes with me. I’ll get back up, be better ’n ever.”

“I know,” I said. “But I have to go. This’s the last train out, I’m saying.”

Now he bashed his palm on the dash. “I can’t fuckin’ think,” he said.

A bandy-legged Asian groundskeeper was doing night work of some kind, laboring over by the roses near the main gates. He wore a platterlike hat. I watched him instead of looking at Raf, who was saying, “I am too old for the constant fuckin’. . . . One uncomplicated dream is all I ask. How could I think about going back with you? That seems so blessedly long ago I lived in the motherfucking East.”

“So, no?”

He sighed. “Gimme a little time. Christ fuck, Paige, give me a night before I decide.”

I thought of the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, when she sings, “I am kinder: I will say yes,” and lets her husband off for so much everything that the chorus blasts, “Then let us all be happy!”