As nasty as the evening was it was followed by a week of truly magnificent sex, finally ended by her period. Warlock at heart was a finicky Calvinist in those days. He had controlled his urge to toss the whole mess in her face. Tears of rage had formed, checked only by a flash of his dream which froze the whole tableau of dinner. Had the blowjob in Seville at the end of the dream really been in Seville after all? The slightly fermented scent of cooked oysters threw him back to a moonlit night in Corona with a fair breeze coming off Flushing Bay, and a file clerk named Isabella whose dark Spanish looks (Puerto Rican) had dazzled him in a foundation office. He had passed his hotel number to her, and, her curiosity sufficiently piqued, they had had dinner and drinks, ending up on a mattress on the roof of her apartment building in Corona. What a magical night it had been, with her cousin’s record player in the apartment below them playing foreign songs of love and torment.

Diana waved a chicken leg across his field of vision and he returned to the table with a slight blush.

“I was thinking about my job. My old job.”

Chapter 4

There were three sisters playing in Lake Michigan beyond a long glistening blond sandspit—they wore green one-piece bathing suits, drawn, in the new fashion, well up their thighs. He had no proof that they were sisters, or that they were thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. He owned an imponderable urge to both create and consume low-rent information, an urge balanced by his superbly inaccurate observations. Were he a writer, he would have been working on a History of Rain.

The three sisters continued playing unmindful of his thought, something that he noted happened all the time. Play on, girls! They chose this moment to swivel against a small wave and simultaneously stare at him. He waved as the one on the far left rearranged the bottoms of her suit, which had pulled up a bit into the crack of her buttocks with a delightful effect.