“No, I mean, why would you believe me, but I love your poems. I probably sound asinine. And that wasn’t dancing, that was just my job” said Pru.

“I don’t think you need apologize to Paige,” Raf said.

“I was impressed by how well you did your job,” I said.

Pru said, “You wouldn’t guess, but this is a highly competitive field. Girls have to audition hard to dance here. But then they make fuckin’ bundles, and it’s clean work—no side stuff unless they want. But you do have to perform in some way—have a special thing, you know? It’s why I do the contortionist shit. See Tanya? She almost made the Olympics when she was young but she got too tall.”

“Paige is new in town,” Raf said.

“How do you like it?” asked Pru.

The doorman in the banker’s grays had moved close to us.

“He wants me to hustle drinks,” Pru said.

“I like it fine,” I said.

Pru stared at me.

Raf lit a cigarette to cut into the silence.

“Excuse me, you like Houston?” Pru said.

“Ah, sure.”

“You got that one poem, I forgot the title, but it’s about Mercury as the morning star and how all the sidewalks smell like bad meat?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Not my cheeriest work.”

“I live by it,” Pru said.

“It kept me indoors for a while,” Raf said.

“I’m just so astounded you like Houston. I mean, you wanna know why I work here? You probably don’t care.”

“Well, I do wonder, in fact. You don’t have to say, but feminism aside . . .”

“Contempt,” Pru said.

“Now you’re talking,” said Raf.

“Yeah, ’cause it’s too late in history for feminism to make any difference, Paige. It’s all coming down. I’m only alive for contempt.”

“What’s coming down?” I asked. “You sound as though you’ve been enrolled in Raf’s joy-of-living seminar.”

“Everything. Every goddamn thing’s coming down. Look at who’s president! Or back up to the Iowa primary and who won that—a fuckin’ televangelist! When Pat Robertson can get enough votes to be in charge of roach removal, then I’m living in the wrong damn country. I especially despise the South,” Pru said. She looked left and right—a spy-movie gesture as if checking for listeners. “I mean to rub my bare ass in the South’s face.”

I said, “The thing is, I don’t imagine the South minds your doing that too much.”

“You could pretend I’m the South,” Raf said.

Pru said, “I hate every pinhead in a ballcap, who drives a pickup truck, shoots deer, kisses my tits on Saturday, the Bible on Sunday. . . .”

“Wait, wait, hold it. Then why do you live here?” I asked her.