To soothe his conscience and appease Claire, Henry took a part-time job (for a time) as plongeur or pearl diver in the kitchen of Mother Hooper’s Café, a dark den for transients, winos, welfare recipients and other derelicts such as himself. Within two weeks he and Claire had accrued enough cash and credit to rent a three-room “studio” apartment in the student ghetto of the University. They took the mattress from the bed of the pickup, beat the dust out of it, laid it on their parlor floor. They bought four gallons of latex enamel and repainted the walls. They improvised bookcases, repaired a salvaged sofa, reglued a pair of chairs, equipped the kitchen with toaster and new table from the Goodwill store and bullied the landlord into fixing the plumbing. Claire rented an upright piano, had it tuned and trundled into the apartment. She picked volunteer snapdragons from the weedy yards in the neighborhood and set them in beer cans and jelly jars on top of the piano, in the kitchen, in the bath. When her students (some of them boys) began to appear, one by one, Henry would sneak off surly to the University library for study or to the bar downtown known as the Dirty Shame Saloon where he began to acquire a circle of cronies, possibly friends, with names like Lacey, Harrington, Richard “Rick” Arriaga and Daniel K. “Decay” Hooligan. The isolate honeymoon was over.

The basic honeymoon was over but Claire and Henry remained lovers nonetheless. He loved her for her brisk energy, her calm courage, her cheerful determination to make a functional marriage of this bizarre connection with an elderly academic bum and liberated libertine like Henry H. Lightcap. What was the point of him? He posed the question often enough himself:

What are you going to do with your life, Henry?

My life? Do with my life? Why should I do anything with my life? I live my life. Or—is it mine? Or am I merely the temporal instrument of my life? A reed in the wind, a seed passing through the bowels of a cactus wren, a swirl of dust rising from an alkaline playa in the heart of the Black Rock Desert, a ripple of motion across the surface of a pond, an ephemeral downward shift of sand on the slipface of a dune? Eh? Speak, O vocalissimus.

Claire never charged him with idleness. But there was a kind of wonder in her eyes sometimes when she asked him, How can you spend so much time reading books?

He smiled. I’d rather be on a horse. Then we’ll get you a horse. We’ll need a one-horse ranch to keep it on. We’ll get you a ranch. Sure. A wedding gift from your mother, I suppose. Henry remembered the gleam of hatred in Mrs. Mellon’s eyes when she’d embraced him, smiling, after the modest ceremony at Point Imperial.

My mother would do anything for us if I asked her; but I don’t intend to ask her. Good, said Henry; I’m sure glad to hear that. But I will come into a trust fund when I’m twenty-five. We won’t need it, he said. (“Come into”? he thought.) It’s not much; about twenty thousand a year. (Henry’s heart skipped a beat. That was twice what he’d ever earned in a single year.) But we could buy a piece of land somewhere, build a house on it. Make a home, raise a garden, keep a pair of horses if you wish.