“And you have to tiptoe up and down the fire escape,” I continued, “every time you want to sneak Christy away from her husband. Anna doesn’t have a fire escape so if Juan comes home you’ve gotta jump from the balcony. Sometimes when Daphne phones for you I answer. . . .”

The hotel where my father and I stayed in Cameroon was called the Pilot. It stood to the side of a runway for a dead airport. The runway had a pink stucco radar tower, blind, its windows smashed to crystal.

There were customs sheds in use as caravansaries, and piled around were blackened bales of wool.

We could hear sheep bleating. Sometimes they’d cough like humans.

We could see Mount Cameroon from the windows. At night, tribesmen would set the brush on the mountain’s top afire.

We could see a dust field with a shrunken tree. Heat, we saw. No signs. No billboards.

The Pilot had a sandstone saloon that was noisy all the time from music and fights.

One evening, salesmen from Duaka visited. These were men with pale shoes that matched their pale suits. They met with women in dresses and took photographs of them with an Instamatic camera—flash bombs of light that made us blink.

I went upstairs early that night, climbed the three flights to my bedroom above. I sat in a square armchair. The radio had picked up a thirsty gargling. Pinned on the walls here were sepia-toned illustrations, carefully torn from a children’s Christmas book.

I brushed palm oil into my hair—brittle from the sun. I was twitchy; thinking, “Lonesome” and “Bored,” and about Raf.

He was in love that summer with someone. Mario knew this and took me away.

If there was any sense in teaching, it was for someone such as Millicent, in one of my first Harvard workshops.

She once situated herself in the Commons Room at Adams House for ten hours, writing hymnal measure, quantitative and syllabic verse.

I heard that her friends suggested she move along, to her quarters or to the cafeteria; heard that she swore at them.

From the one working phone booth outside the Fiesta I called South Houston State and asked to speak to Davey Salizar. I’d known Davey since graduate school. He was director this August, of the SHS Adult Education Conference.

“Is there any kind of opening for me?” I asked. “What do you have left?”

In fact, there was a slot teaching poetry writing to physicists. Davey said that some program advisor in administration had the idea of cross-discipline courses, and that dozens of scientists were enrolling for month-long classes on music theory, drama, film technique, dance history, glass blowing, and writing verse.

I found Raf checking expiration dates on orange-juice cartons in the Fiesta’s dairy section.

I said, “I might do some teaching while I’m here.”