“My God,” I said. “No wonder it doesn’t have a name.”

Charlie smiled.

“Shall we give it a name, Charlie?” Aurora asked.

“Tell you the truth, miss,” Charlie said, “even with a name nobody would believe it.”

He poured the thing into a cocktail glass. Aurora sipped the drink.

“Marvelous,” she said. “Aren’t I a good inventor?”

“Yes, miss.”

She looked at me. She was happy with her invention. “So,” she said, “this man went into a butcher shop, and?”

“Do you really want to hear the joke?”

“But of course.”

“Well. He goes into the butcher shop and he sees two signs. One sign says: Writer’s brains, nineteen cents a pound. The other sign says: Producer’s brains, seventy-nine cents a pound.”

“Really?”

I waited. She sipped her drink.

“Now you are supposed to ask me,” I said patiently, “why producer’s brains cost seventy-nine cents a pound and writer’s brains only cost nineteen cents a pound.”

“I am?”

“If it’s not too much of an effort.”

“Oh, it isn’t any effort at all, Asher. This one is really marvelous,” she said to Charlie. “When I do ask,” she said to me, “then it’s the joke?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s usually the way it works out there.”

“Out where?”

“Where I come from.”

“I’d love the Coast. Would you take me out to the Coast sometime, Asher?”

“Happy to.”

“They have avocado trees, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Is it different, Asher, under an avocado tree?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She thought a moment.

“What about my fur coat?”

“What about your fur coat?”

“I couldn’t wear it out there, could I? I mean: it’s sub-tropical or something, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“But I couldn’t exist without my fur coat,” Aurora said. “Oh, God, Asher, you’re never going to lay me under an avocado tree.”

I felt myself flush. Just a little.

“I’ll plant one.”

“Where?”

“In the bedroom at my hotel.”

She brightened.

“Asher,” she said, “that’s practically an invention.”

“How about the end of my joke? Are you up to it?”

“I’m sorry, darling. I was supposed to ask, wasn’t I, why a producer’s brains cost seventy-nine cents a pound and a writer’s brains cost only nineteen?”

“Well, the butcher said, do you know how many producers you have to kill to get a pound of brains?”

Aurora laughed.

I was gratified that she laughed and that the joke had been, despite its convoluted telling, some sort of a success.

“Did you have a big house in California?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And a wife?”

“And a wife.”

“Whom you no longer have?”

“Whom I no longer have.”

“Poor Asher.”

“I don’t feel like an object of pity at the moment.”

“Why?”

“It must be the company.”

“Does your wife know you’re in New York?”

“No. I just up’d and fled.”

“In the dead of night?”

“About.”

“Have you written to her?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

“What will you do?”

“Hide.”

“Forever?”

“Longer than that.”

“Where?”

“In a hole. Like a mole.”