She glanced right through me, as she had since we’d first met several years ago, and turned to her husband. “Jack, can I skip out on the last set?” she asked. “I need a little air.” Vera then whispered something in her husband’s ear. I could discern the words “monthly visit from my friend.”

Jack nodded. “Certainly, why not?” It wasn’t really a question, and she didn’t answer it.

I have been afflicted since birth with the need to fill silences. I said, “You sang ‘Believe You Me’ especially well tonight, Vera.”

“I had to,” she replied, not taking her eyes off Jack. “It’s an especially crummy arrangement.”

The arrangement, of course, was mine. About three quarters of Jack’s current book had been orchestrated by me.

“I suppose I’ve done better charts,” I conceded.

“None that I’ve heard,” she said.

For some unknown reason, Vera had been skewering me so much for the last few weeks that I’d debated getting a booster shot in case tetanus set in. Lockjaw could seriously impair my sax playing.

She brushed by me, pushing past my right hip as if I were hinged like a swinging door.

As she did, I heard a rustling noise, that of paper against fabric, something like the sound you might hear if you were a man and a woman had slipped a folded note into the outer pocket of your brown suit jacket while her husband was looking directly at you. That sort of sound.

“Sorry she was rude,” offered Jack as soon as Vera left the terrace. “She says it’s that difficult time of the month for her.” He stared directly at my jacket pocket with his best impression of a smile. “Seems she wants to make it a difficult time for me as well.”

I put my hands above my head as if volunteering to be frisked. “Jack, I swear to you, I don’t know what gives.”

He tossed his cigarette to the ground and stepped closer, but I wasn’t as concerned about Jack hurting me as I was about Vera hurting him. I let him fish the note out of my pocket. He placed it, unread, upon the sand of a standing ashtray and lit it from a book of Claremont matches.

As we watched it burn, he said, “She just does these things to reassure herself that she’s important. The more I tolerate, the more she knows she’s the star of the band. And she is, so I tolerate it. It’s no different from the actress who demands pink azaleas out of season because they’re so hard to get. You’ve never responded to any of her overtures, Ray, and that makes you hard to get. You’re just her latest pink azalea.”