“What’s Joe Green looking at?” Rebecca wondered, emerging from the shower, wrapped in one towel, drying her hair with another.

“The girls, I think. Aren’t they in position? That’s usually what interests him out there, right, Joe Green?”

“There they are. Pretty. They look totally alike. They must be sisters from the same litter. Those markings on their chests are exactly the same. I wonder if their owner can tell them apart. Who belongs to them?”

“Why do we assume they’re all girls?”

“I’ve told you. Look at them. They’re calicos. Three colors. It would be a genetic rarity if they weren’t girls. They have to be girls. Anyway, look at those delicate heart-shaped faces. They’re girls. Boy cats have big cabbage heads.”

“Joe Green has a perfect little head. Don’t insult us boys.”

“Sorry.” Rebecca rewrapped her towel around herself and came over to where George was working by the window. “It’s cold in here.”

“I think she’s a curator at the Met, or the Frick, one of those,” George said. “She moved in about a year ago, I think.”

“Who?”

“The woman who goes with the girls. You asked. I met her once at a block association meeting a few months ago. She wants to keep our block alternate side of the street parking. She advocated for more callery pear trees. Oh, and she’s a Democrat. I stood on line with her to vote in the last Democratic primary. Her last name has to be A to H, because we were in the same line.”

“Who is this?”

“You know who I mean. You met her once with me, on the street. Remember, she was splashing across the street in those big green galoshes that day it was raining insanely? And she said hello to us and something about the ‘dirty weather,’ and you asked me who she was and how did I know her?”

“Oh, yes, yes, our age-ish, maybe a little older?”

“Yeah—plain, but smart-looking, kind of serious—she looks like your basic West Village classic leftover Vassar art history major. She lives alone, at least I’ve never seen anyone else there, a cat lady with her cats. And she’s a huge improvement over that creepy guy in the bathrobe with the strobe lights, for sure.”

“She’s the one I said looked like a therapist?”

“That’s the one. Don’t go telling her your innermost thoughts next time you see her buying fruit at Balducci’s.”

“I might.”

“Ah!”

“What?” Rebecca bent over to see what George had pulled out.

“Don’t! Your hair is dripping.”

“Sorry.”

“I was looking for something old, and I found it. You remember my telling you about the piece I wrote based on glass bowls and seawater and the tide?”

“Not really.”

He took the folio pages over to the piano, and after a pause to polish his eyeglasses, something George did ritualistically whenever he sat down at the piano, he began to play.

“Pretty!”

“Too pretty. Pretty juvenile,” George said, stopping.

“No, I like it, keep going.”