He hosted an overnight advice show, eleven p.m. to two a.m., on another AM channel, not mine. He had a beef bourguignon voice and regular callers. Stewart from Omaha. Allison from Asbury Park, New Jersey. Linda from Chattanooga.

“Thank you,” he said. Then added, “If that’s the appropriate response.”

“I’m in radio, too,” I said. “Not talent. HR.”

The waiter stood by my table, a tall young man with an old-fashioned Cesar Romero mustache. When I looked at him he smiled and revealed a full set of metal braces.

“I will have the fruit plate,” I said. Then, as though it meant nothing to me, an afterthought, “and a Bloody Mary.”

It is the fear of judgment that keeps me behaving, most of the time, like the religious. Not of God but of strangers.

“Hair of the dog,” the radio shrink said to me.

“Hair of the werewolf,” I answered.

“You could be. On air. You have a lovely voice.”

In my head I kept a little box of compliments I’d heard more than once: I had nice hair (wavy, strawberry blond), and nice skin, and a lovely voice. I didn’t believe the compliments, particularly at such times in my life, but I liked to keep them for review, as my mother reviewed the scrapbooks from her childhood in a small town, when her every unusual move—going to England on a trip, performing in a play in the next town over—made the local paper.

Who in this story do I love? Nobody. Myself, a little. Oh, the waiter, with his diacritical mustache above his armored teeth. I love the waiter. I always love the waiter.

The Bloody Mary had some spice in it that sent a tickle through my palate into my nose. A prickle, a yearning, an itch: a gathering sneezish sensation. One in ten Bloody Marys did this to me. I always forgot. I took another drink and the feeling intensified. Beneath the pressure of the spice was a layer of leftover intoxication that the vodka perked up. I thought, not for the first time, that I had a sixth sense and it was called drunkenness.

“No good?” the radio shrink asked me.

“What?”

“You’re making a terrible face.”

“It’s good,” I said, but the sensation was more complicated than that. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

“Is it a neck?” He touched his own neck with the tips of his fingers. “I like the rooms here.”

“You probably have a nicer room than I do. The presidential suite. The honeymoon.”

“I’m neither the president nor a honeymooner.”

“Those’re the only suites I know,” I said. It was possible to be somebody else in a hotel; I was slipping into a stranger’s way of speaking. I said, “Far from Chicago.”