She was working with a piece of pine board and woodcut tools. She pried loose a jagged line of wood, across the grain, cracked the gouge handle with a hammer.

She said to Raymond, “You hate my doing this.”

“Hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“But if you had, you’d hate it.”

“Depends,” said Raymond.

“No,” Pru said. “You would. For some reason, any goddamned reason.”

Raymond said, “Paige wasn’t noticing you either. She’s focused someplace else. She’s just too polite to say.”

“Then go live with her!” said Pru. “See how long she can stand you.”

“Say, Paige. Pru says I should go live with you.”

“She doesn’t even mind your drunk talk. The same fuckin’ note, over and over.”

“Say, Paige, Pru says I should live with you and you like my one-note drunk talk.”

“Only he doesn’t like sex, Paige, you should know. He doesn’t dislike it, but he can go weeks . . .”

“Paige doesn’t care,” said Raymond.

I said, “Could we change the subject, please? I mean to anything at all?”

“One note, one note, one note,” said Pru.

“Right after he left Princeton,” said Raymond, “I stayed with Raf in Malibu. He’s living on the beach. Tex Watson’s his landlord. And Raf’d fight with him and fight with Manson. This’s before they were into killing people, but just doing goats, drinking the blood of live chickens, I think I heard.

“Another time, a little baby shark floats up in the tide? And this girl with Raf, she wants to keep it. Dead little silver shark. But by next day the whole entire beach’s polluted so Raf’s gotta bury the thing. Pru thinks I’m gay,” Raymond said.

“I tend to think that about most men,” she said. She turned to me. “Except, that time at work when Raf walked in. I’d never seen him before. One look at him and I felt weak.”

Raymond said, “I better sign myself into Ben Taub, they got a detox. ’Cause it’s getting like ‘Wonder whose place this is, sure looks familiar.’ You know? I mean, how do you steer the goddamn thing?”

Raymond called on me after the hospital—browner, blonder, thinner; even more tightly wound than before.

It was late October, a melancholy, thick, itchy day.

“You wanna know what I think?” he asked. He had a duffel bag of Raf’s hooped in his arms.

The smoke-colored car was loaded up with Raf’s stuff—his running gear, his pairs of black Levi’s, his shaving kit, his T-shirts, a carved stone jaguar, his books, swollen and broken from the way he read them. All this was packed into three labeled boxes, going back to Brookline by rail.

Raymond bent into the car with Raf’s CD player and CD’s. The interior was an oven from the sun at the end of the drive.