“Is this some more of your Oriental bullshit?” he hollered up the stairwell. “It’s fucking slant balderdash, you bitch. Why don’t you move to fucking Tokyo you fucking Tokyo Rose bitch traitor.” It didn’t help. She turned up one of her favorite records, Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, very loud to drown out his voice. He fought back with a B.B. King record at top volume but his head ached. Then he had gone to the bar.

Oddly, he felt, some nine months later, that her silly lesson had worked. He wouldn’t admit it aloud. Dad would faint if he became a sucker for a bunch of Tojo propaganda. But in the past month since his dream of the future, Dad had somehow become less of a moving force in his life. So when he hit the Traverse City limits he yelled “Leave yourself alone,” felt immediately better and stopped at a bar noted for its burgers and stuffed animal mounts. He ate the burger—after all, Diana might have neglected his dinner—directly under a very dusty great white owl. Diana certainly was shrewd. He chuckled, remembering that the day after the quarrel he had dragged one of the landlord’s cherry-picking ladders out of the barn, and through the snowdrifts to the back of the house. He had climbed the ladder with some excitement, scraped the frost off the window with his fingernails and peeked in: it was disappointingly plain, featuring a black mat and cushion, a hot plate and teapot, a record player, bare white walls, a small fat figurine that faced away from the window. Did his wife worship strange gods? Maybe he was lucky—the wife of a friend in Lansing had become an obnoxious Jesus freak after Bob Dylan turned the corner.

Warlock reached home in the twilight, thrilled by a gorgeous sunset and the hills rolling down to the lake, covered by precise rows of laden cherry trees. He despised the flavor of the fruit but you sure couldn’t knock the prosperity of the local farmers. It wasn’t their fault that he had, at age ten, eaten a whole jar of maraschino cherries on a quarter bet. Not only had he puked a lot but the buddy never had the quarter in the first place.

She found him asleep on the couch after midnight, her note resting on his stomach, and the pistol grip glaring from its holster. Her note advising that she had a long emergency period in surgery because of an auto accident had depressed him. She was very somber after these emergency sessions and that meant the green gown and garter belt were definitely out. There was an ugly sense of embarrassment when he reflected that there had probably been a terrible accident and here he was thinking about his dick. She kissed him awake.

“Was it bad?” he murmured.