High winds redistribute bouquets, and Alice Parker’s roses blow to Grace Hall one row over; carnations intended for Henry Hand work loose from a vase and are trapped by the stone of Red Howell, Senior, interred at Indianapolis.

At dinner this evening, Warren talked about his pet. He said he had had a spider monkey named Elmer and Chatty interrupted, having heard it as “monkey spider,” to tell the table about the one she and her ex-husband had seen (from where they lay beneath mosquito netting covering their bed) climb into a wardrobe in their rented villa in Nevis.

“We left the island without our clothes,” Chatty said.

Warren continued. “My parents rented a place in Hatteras where we were supposed to spend the summer. Me and my sister and our parents and Elmer and about a million crazed mosquitoes. My dad read where you could order chameleons through the mail, so he bought two dozen of them, and let them loose in the house. My mother called it a harmonious solution, until we got home from the beach the next day and Elmer met us at the top of the stairs with what turned out to be the last two chameleons, one in each fist. When he saw us,” Warren said, “he waved them over his head like pennants. When my mother screamed at him, Elmer brought one fist to his mouth and bit the head off the chameleon. Then he did the same thing with the other.”

I asked him if monkeys know right from wrong, and Warren said, “Elmer was a goblin from hell. He used to jump on the dogs’ backs and make them carry him around the house until they learned to duck under the coffee table and knock the bastard off.”

Warren burned himself putting out a cigarette, and Karen began to cry. Warren took a long drink from his Coke can.

“Thought you quit,” Chatty said.

Chatty looked beneficently around the table. “I am getting better,” she said. “So the others are starting to fail.”

That time I was in London, I went to an elegant dinner for which the chef assembled a roast turkey inside of which was lodged a goose, inside of which was a duck that housed a chicken that contained a game hen—all of them boned and served with a dark, tart currant sauce. I think of that dinner, of the chef slicing through the five fowl, when I imagine what kind of woman you like. A woman who contains a series of surprises? There are clues in the women you have had, though the thought of asking you what you like is like the team of artists who hired a marketing firm to find out what Americans want in a painting. The artists painted the result of the poll which found that what we want is a blue painting the size of a dishwasher with a biblical figure and landscape.

I am so suggestible. When Chatty asks if I am hungry, I say, “I could be.” I would try to become the woman you wanted without even knowing I was trying. As it is, I am barely the woman I am.