“I won’t for long. I’m getting out. Me, my daughter, we’re migrating to Canada. Fleeing before the Inquisition, if there’s time.”

Raf had shut his eyes and smiled along with Pru’s attack as if she were thumping a drum solo.

“I hate the U.S. I hate the South. I hate men,” she listed.

“Oh me, more of that,” I said.

“So I work as a stripper and gorge on contempt. I’m like on fire with it. It keeps me fueled,” Pru said.

“You really hate men?”

“And women,” Pru said. “Although not you.”

“Raf?” I asked.

“He’s O.K. Now look at Tanya.”

We did.

Tanya was in a position that would’ve been right for urinating in a drainage ditch.

“Born-again Christian,” Pru told us.

Raf said, “This birth didn’t work out either. She should try for one more.”

“Ever been to Canada?” I asked Pru.

“Yes, and it’s better, Paige. Better.”

“But there are pinheads and child beaters and flag wavers up there as well.”

“It’s still better ’cause they’re not Americans, and not from the fucking South, at least. I can deal with all the other shit if there’s time,” said Pru.

“I like a person with a goal,” Raf said.

“Really? Well, then I wonder if you’d be real sweet and buy some drinks from me. It’s gotta look like I been working to that pecker who runs the floor.”

We ordered, and on her way to the bar Pru shot the banker fellow a hundred-watt smile.

“A person can be bad and still have a lot of courage,” Raf said in the car.

“Bad?”

“Yeah, very bad,” he said.

Raf’s America

MOTORING OVER TO PRU’S in the smoke-colored car a day later, the radio amazed and impressed me with its clear delivery of the La Scala production of Un Ballo in Maschera. I liked this version, but knew enough Italian to get that the baritone was singing: “Three o’clock! Three o’clock! It’s three, three, three, o’clock!”

“ ’S really an honor, come in,” Pru said.

Her apartment was in the art-gallery district; in an eighties’ cake-shaped building that rose five layers tall. Wrapping each story were strips of chrome piping.

“This is my daughter, Lilith,” Pru said, introducing a three-year-old well-nourished child with white-blond pigtails and ribbons. Lilith wore a long T-shirt that fitted her like a dress, “RICHARD HELL,” the T-shirt said.

I crouched and shook her chubby hand.

Nearly the whole fourth floor of the round building was taken up by Pru’s apartment. It had no interior walls. The place reminded me of a dance studio.

Back in the living area, pieces of cubistic furniture made a kind of corral, and there a wall of bookshelves showed hundreds of bright waxy spines.