“Yeah. I read about it in this magazine. This woman ran out of gas, and she took her bucket, walked over to one of those trees, filled up, and had enough oil to drive home. Let’s just call it ‘gas-station tree.’ ”

“Okay,” he said, pensive, like he wasn’t really listening.

“I bet you folks have so many natural resources here you haven’t discovered yet,” I said.

Now I was made out of chitchat and fidgety like I had a burr in my pants.

“So long,” I said, when we arrived and extended my hand, ready to board.

He looked at me like I was a crazy woman. He grabbed both of my shoulders, pulled me to him, and kissed me.

“Just think of me as one of those gas-station trees,” he said, turned and walked briskly back to the jeep.

I thought of all the people who saw him but didn’t see him. He didn’t wave from the jeep; he just nodded and turned onto the road.

38

“You’re Catherine Shuger’s friend, aren’t you?”

I was standing at the cosmetics counter at Hudson’s in downtown Detroit.

“Yes.”

She took hold of my elbow and moved me a bit away from the counter where I’d been sampling Charles of the Ritz’s perfumes.

“Hasn’t she been committed again? Didn’t her husband commit her again?”

Catherine was out for the weekend, but Ernest was taking her back to Ann Arbor on Monday. I had flown in from Madagascar—where I’d been working on a travel book—to spend the weekend with them, but I didn’t want to talk about my friends to this woman. She was an attractive young woman, wearing a fox jacket, midi-length wool skirt, and Italian leather boots. To look at her you wouldn’t think she was a busybody. I wondered what she’d be wearing if she had to trap the fox herself.

“Is it true what they say? That he goes and gets her every weekend and takes her out, and every weekend she tries to kill him. Is it really true?”

“I heard it was every month,” I said.

“You mean you don’t know either? Aren’t you two close?”

“Which two?”

Her mouth fell open. She gathered herself. Her fingers massaged her throat. “You’re close to them both, I assume.”

“They don’t let me get too close,” I said.

Her other hand was still on my elbow. It was insistent.

“Come on, what’s it like? What’s it like? It must be a trip.”

I took my elbow out of her hand.

“I’ve got to be going,” I said.

Both hands massaged her neck, then one settled on her hip; the other played with the fur on her jacket.

“She doesn’t give interviews, does she?” she asked, both hands on her hips now.

“Oh, you’re a journalist? Oh, that explains it.”

“I tried to do a story on her for the Detroit Free Press. She wouldn’t talk to me and her husband wouldn’t talk to me. And now you won’t talk to me. What’s your name anyway?”