Pru said, “You’d think I’d end up smelling like fruitcake with these ingredients. But no, the scent makes men hungry. They’re always getting their appetites confused. One guy I know—are you listening?”

“Hard,” I said.

“He’s worth jillions and never worked a minute of his gross sinful life, but the only way he can do it is if there’s chocolate food messed in. Like Hershey’s syrup? Sex, I mean.”

“Huh,” I said. “Let’s change the channel.”

“Symbolic as all hell to me, Paige.”

“It is, but a well-traveled road. Where oh where is your babysitter?”

I answered the door for the sitter, who stepped inside but said nothing. The woman had stripped her hair of all color, and her complexion, by lack of contrast, looked doughy, drowning-victim white.

“Portuguese,” Pru whispered to me.

“One of the undead. Drawn by Brueghel. On return from hell,” I said.

Pru had worked me into a cocktail dress of hers. I’d brought no evening clothes to Houston.

“Looks better on you, you should keep it,” she kept saying.

I thought for wearing in public this silk dress needed more substance. It seemed an underslip, not a dress. And the sheer black nylons and garter belt—also Pru’s—went with my notion of whore.

“Hell, it’s all from New York,” she said, as she stuck brass hoop earrings and a brass cuff on me. “Classy, classy. What size are your feet?”

Her size, so now I teetered on six-inch heels: shoes that were open-toed, sequin-sprinkled, covered with an iridescent fabric.

“You oughta dress that way all the time. You know, I love putting clothes on other women. I mean, love it. Do you think that means I’m a latent gay?”

“Big furious no,” I said.

“Especially if they’re pretty. Then I like to watch them in action and see the effects of the clothes. And I have fantasies . . .” Pru said.

“All woman do, probably.”

“And I’ve watched movies of other women in bed.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Your fantasies were better.”

“Yeah, but what does that prove? Fantasies always are.”

“You’d know it by now if you were gay.”

“Raf told me that you are,” Pru said.

“He what?”

“Bisexual. He said you’re bisexual. He said the three of us should go to bed together sometime, is all. Don’t get mad at him, Paige. If you’re mad, it’ll spoil tonight.”

Raf and Raymond were our dates. They were already late.

Pru’s pride in my appearance made her as loopy as a mom who’d wrestled her daughter away from a swim meet and into Easter whites. “Look at you!” she said. “Raf sees you, he’s gonna pop his cork.”

Pru opened the door on a lopsided Raf. His elbow on the side wall was all that kept him standing.