It is very difficult to be awakened by a phone call with a severe hangover and discover someone you love is dead, especially if that someone is you. Of course it was a dream call but Johnny didn’t know that. He stepped out of bed with an extraordinary sense of lightness—so the diet is finally paying off—fairly floating through the dining room to the kitchen where the phone suddenly stopped. And there he was, smack dab in the middle of the kitchen floor; his face looked like where the deep purple fell, a huge windfall plum on the yellow linoleum. Then he was floating back to the bedroom where he screeched with truly hideous volume, and shook his wife, Diana, awake.

“I’m out there and I’m dead. I’m dead.”

“But you’re here, darling.” She rose to her knees in alarm, the sheet falling from her shoulder.

“I’m in the kitchen and I’m dead,” he sobbed, slamming his head into her lap with rigid force. “On the floor, dead as a doornail, for god’s sake. Go look.”

“This better not be some chintzy way of getting laid.” But no, his shoulders were shaking uncontrollably. She scrambled down the bed, after shoving him away like a piece of cordwood. For the first time in their seven years of marriage he did not stare at her beautiful bottom—oh gates of hell—when she got out of bed. And it wasn’t that this particular bottom was framed by a foreshortened, satin slip nightie gotten mail order from Los Angeles; no, it was simply one of the best on earth, way up in that realm where comparisons are truly odious. She returned from the body search. “There’s nothing on the kitchen floor but the tipped over garbage can. I think it fair to presume the garbage can isn’t you. Now I have two hours to sleep before I go to work.”

“It must have been a dream,” he said, with precarious certainty. He poked tentatively at her bottom which, he felt, had a curious way of aiming at him, somewhat in the manner that those at the bottom of the genetic pool feel that TV performers are talking to them.

“Oh god, darling, not now. I’ll do anything after work. Just let me sleep.”

“Anything?” he chuckled, getting up. “I’ll make you a dinner you won’t forget. Fish, game, fowl, veal, pork? Throw a dart at the culinary map, baby, and it’ll be on the table.” He really wasn’t so much a fool as he was giddy about still being alive.

“Please be quiet, darling.”

He dressed quickly and smacked Hudley, the dog, for the garbage can mess, a ritual repeated countless times. Why would a dog want the forbidden fruit of leftover sauerkraut?