Of the apple peel he was making an unbroken coil, a perfect spiral.

“Are you going to eat that when you’re finished?” I asked.

“Well, no,” Raymond said, and looked as though perhaps he should apologize. He said, “Raf stopped laying any of that on me. Must’ve seen how it was spoiling my program. He knows better ’n to bring it up.”

“Still does with me,” I said.

“You two are weird,” Raymond said. “Though I wish you both well. I honestly do.”

Our waiter delivered our lunch orders—chimichangas and spiced corn.

“You want this necklace, amigo?” Raymond asked the waiter. “Give it to your girl?” He was offering the coil of apple peel.

All afternoon we rode around in Raymond’s green convertible. He showed me the downtown—Louisiana Street, the Interfirst Bank Building, which Hurricane Alicia had smashed into; a Dubuffet sculpture titled “Monument to The Phantom” in the plaza; on Milan, the Tex Comm Tower with its (Miró) sculpture, a steel work called “Personage with Birds.”

We angled on one-way streets—past Tranquility Park, built for the first moon landing; past Sam Houston Park, where, Raymond said, there used to be a zoo.

He said, “Oil wasn’t all, don’t think that. We’re still the leader on mineral products. Sulfur, helium, graphite, other stuff, clay . . . There’s plenty to do, and deserted mansions you can rent. I don’t know why Raf’s got you living over in the Mother Teresa district.

“Look at that palm. That’s a Coco Plumoso. I wanted to name our daughter Coco Plumoso but Luisa said no. See the dead part on top, looks like the skirt on a hula girl? There’s rats in there. You got a queen palm, you better keep it trimmed back or you get rats.”

We drove the Southwest Freeway and veered off to ride alongside the Brazos River. Raymond said, “Oldest story’s that it was named Brazos de Dios—Arms of God—by Coronado. Him and his men was about to die of thirst when some of our Indians guided ’em to water.”

“What kind of Indians?” I asked.

“Ah, they’d have been Comanch, mainly,” he said. “And littler tribes too, like the Tawakoni. But Chickasaw, Apache, Cherokee. You name it, they was here, and I mean here here.”

Raf once told me that at the zoo where he worked as a teenager, when rainstorms broke, the big cats would copulate—the leopards, the lions. I asked him, “Really?” And he said, “Well, it’s what I remember,” as if his remembering were enough.

He was seated at the round-top dining table over a copy of The Schopenhauer Reader. Its jacket was cracked and curled.

“Well, what happened?” he asked me. “How’d it go? Why didn’t Raymond come in?”

“He went to take Luisa and the baby to the pediatric clinic. Nothing happened.”

“What all’d you talk about?”