“Well,” he said, “I know.”

We got my bags and Raf’s bundles of running gear inside.

The living room was narrow and dark, and although the windows were propped open, warm.

“No air conditioning,” I said.

“One hundred a month, furnished, utilities paid. Be realistic, Paige. What can you expect?”

I stalked into the kitchen. It was better. Through the rear windows, a thicket of weeds and wild flowers gave off sweet smells. I heard a cricket, and birds.

I went back to the living room. Raf had taken off his shirt. He lay on a blue vinyl sofa he’d dragged into a breeze from the screen door.

His face looked suffered, sharpened. “Come over here and kneel down,” he said.

“No you don’t. I need to talk to you about bugs.”

“El remedio es Black Flag.”

“What about rats, then, and lizards?”

“Plenty of both. Come on, Paige.” His hand moved to unsnap his Levi’s.

I rummaged in my satchel and threw the first thing I found—a five-pound anthology of Deep Image poetry. I missed him with that, but flung a ceramic mug and connected just over his eyebrow. He caught the mug on the rebound and held it protectively. I slung my notebook at him, a bottle of nail lacquer, my pocket calculator, sunglasses, a packet of tampons, triple-A batteries.

“You tick, Raf,” I said. “You lowlife.”

He didn’t raise an arm or duck but permitted the storm as if it were his due.

“You don’t want to live here?” he asked finally.

“Live!” I said. “I don’t want to know about here.”

Raf rode me around the new neighborhood to show me its sidewalk charms. We saw an Asian couple pushing a grocery carriage full of aluminum soda cans, some kids trapping a dog in a hammock.

A rooster picked its way across the street ahead of us. Raf pumped the brake pedal and we slam-stopped.

“Look at that moron,” Raf said.

The rooster twisted his head to glare at us. His eye was like a chip of some glossy stone—a mineral eye.

“I think you were going too fast,” I said.

Raf shook his head no. He was smiling. He said, “Come on, you gotta like the fuckin’ bird.”

Raf was as happy as he ever got, in the Desglaises Street house. The furniture was indestructible, so he could tumble it, climb on it, kick and send the castered chairs rolling.

He mounted a unit air conditioner in our bedroom window, and the machine kept the whole upstairs meat-locker cold.

“Say what you will, there is no television here,” he said. “And there will be no fuckin’ television. And no telephone either.”

The place was like a 1930s gangsters’ hole-up, but the days, I found, did have more time in them.