“You look wonderful,” Raymond said. “And, Pru? I’m in love with you and I should face up to it. That ain’t the bottle talking neither.”

I told Raf to stand up. “And zip your shirt!” I said.

“You wanna fuck?” he asked me. “I’ll do things to you nobody’s thought of.”

“Who could refuse that offer?” I said.

Pru asked, “What’s left that nobody’s thought of? I’m just curious.”

“If Paige answers no, Prudence, how about you?” said Raf.

“You married a maggot,” she told me.

“A one-eyed dead one,” Raymond said.

Raf said, “Let’s load up in the limo. I got dancin’ feet and a pantsload of penis.”

“Oh, ugh,” Pru said.

“O.K., fuck the wedding ring, fuck my marriage. Raf’s right. Let’s just get goin’,” Raymond said.

Pru asked me if we should.

Both men were up now, brushing each other off, trying to behave.

“We’ll just pretend they have a disease, Paige. That’s what the AMA considers alcoholism,” Pru said.

“True, but they also consider rabies a disease, yet I rarely go dancing with two rabid men.”

“Pru wishes she had four rabid men, or an auditorium- ful,” Raf said. “Or an army of rabid men. Rabbit men?”

Raymond said, “Just please don’t let no one have stolen the car.”

The summer Raf loved someone else, I kept thinking, “That’s some other Raf.” And mostly I was thinking how to work the next curve, so hard was a single Cameroon day.

At the Pilot, the water supply would shut off. We’d bargain for soap, carry cakes of it around in the pockets of our trousers. And then mornings we’d check to see if the sprinklers were out on the lawns of the couple-few government buildings.

In a hard jet of the sprinkler water we could shampoo our hair, wash our clothes, rinse Mario’s painting jars and brushes, soak our sneakers through and through.

The arches of sprinkler water and their mist would make great white shapes that looked like shrubbery from a distance. Whenever he saw the shapes appear, Mario would say, “Problem solved, Piagga,” or he’d say, “We got the luck!”

As we were leaving Pru’s, I copped a fifth of Benedictine from her liquor cabinet.

“Sit up straight, woman. Drink with dignity,” Raf told me, as we sped in Pru’s car through a tunnel of smeary lights, past a candelabra-like fountain.

Raymond lounged sideways on the passenger’s seat, gaping at Pru.

The drink finally caught fire in my stomach. “Where is she taking us?” I asked.

“You’ll like it,” Pru said.

Raymond said, “I can make trivial decisions. Like is it Pepsi-Cola or RC; what watt of bulb goes in this fixture. But I’ll be switched if I can decide who to love, or what God wants.”

“Knock it off, Ray-mo,” Raf said. “You’re fast descending the ladder of my respect.”