He read anything. I brought him magazines, Antaeus, the TLS. At the Brazos Bookstore on Bissonnet I bought for him a slender novel from Brazil, the diary of a dead painter, a new play by an Irishwoman.

He wanted noise—the radio on. He listened to the jazz station, or the student broadcasts from Rice. He watched two-star movies on the TV’s cable channels, watched whatever came on.

One night he left the news channel blaring on TV, and the newscasters’ voices mingled with my dreams. As we rolled out of bed in the morning, I said, “Anything you want to know about Sissy Wallcock, the little liver baby, just ask me. I know what Sissy ate yesterday on her birthday. I know what presents she got, besides the new liver.”

“Aw, I heard all that. I was awake,” Raf said. “But then I harkened and changed over to Route 66.”

“You did? Which episode?” I asked.

“Todd poses as an American Nazi and to prove his loyalty to the group he has to beat up Buz.”

“That’s a good one,” I said.

He slept now as I gazed through the motel window at all the car metal glimmering in the lot below, in the beam of a full moon.

I drifted down to the Firecat and crawled inside. I pretended my parents, Mario and Dottie, were young again, still married, riding on either side of me. I pretended they were la-la-la-ing along with the radio as it played Scarlatti—quick-music/slow-music/quick-music; an Italian overture, the origin of symphony.

Mono Astro, a hair place, hadn’t been able to schedule me in until our last day at the Park Inn.

Raf asked, “Are you getting it all whacked off, Paige?”

“I have to see, I haven’t decided.”

“Just get it whacked off. Let’s both do, in fact,” he said. “I’m coming along.”

Mono Astro had an Asian theme inside. There were empty areas and blank walls, paper screens, neutral colors.

Raf dropped into a long chair that folded out in sections. He whistled along with the music surrounding us—a song by Turnpike People.

I told the woman who seemed to be running things that I wanted a shampoo, a cut, maybe a cellophane rinse.

“Maybe yes or maybe no?” she asked. Her natural voice was a whisper. Weedy sprouts of hair stood up on her scalp.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said.

“I want Vampira there to work on me,” Raf said.

“He likes you,” I explained.

“I’m married,” the woman whispered.

She introduced a man who resembled her, who had the same traumatized hair. This was Boomer, her husband.

I got horizontal in the deeply padded chair with my neck arched, my head tipped back, my hair flung in a sink.