"Let's go downstairs to our old room."

"Chandra."

"Chandra's not here."

"How?"

"How to get down? We can go down to the kitchen and take the elevator."

"All right."

She seems agreeable. I am pleased.

She's not too drunk to back down the stairs to the kitchen exactly as we came up, smiling at the joke of me keeping her safe.

Chandra's room, our old bedroom, is spick and span. The Sears Best bed takes up half the room. There's a photograph on the bed table of Chandra receiving the Loyola broadcast journalism award from Howard K. Smith.

"Undress," says Ellen.

I begin undressing.

"Me."

"What? Oh." She's leaning over toward me, arms outstretched, pullover blouse pulled half up. The neck drags across her short wiry wheat-colored hair, but it springs back into place.

She waits for me to undress her, smiling and cooperative, standing when standing is required, sitting, lifting herself. I finish undressing her; she is standing, naked, smiling and turning. She is tanned all over. There are no white areas. Compared to the convent beds, the Sears Best mattress looks as big as a soccer field.

Ellen starts for the bed. I start for the wall switch and turn out the light and head back.

"Lights!" says Ellen.

Very well. By the time I've turned on the light and come back, Ellen is in bed but is, to my surprise, not lying on her side as she used to but is on all fours.

Very well, if that's- "Well, bucko?"

Bucko?

"Cover," says Ellen.

"You mean-" I say, taking the sheet.

"No."

"I understand," I say, and cover.

"All right," says Ellen.

It is all right, though surprising, because we have never made love so. Her head is turned and I miss seeing her face. There is only a tousle of wiry hair, a glimpse of cheek and eyes, now closed, and mouth mashed open. She utters sounds.

Afterward as we spoon-nest in our old style, she drowses off but goes on talking. It's a light, dreaming sleep, because the words I can understand are uttered with that peculiar emphasis people use when they talk in their sleep. It's REM sleep. I can see her eyes move under her lids. I'm afraid to turn out the light.

"Schenken or K.S.?" she asks in her dream.

"Schenken?"

"Blackwood shmackwood."

"All right." I think she's using contract bridge words. She's playing in a tournament.

"Mud," she says.

"Mud?"

"Bermuda Bowl, but no Fresno."

I am curious. I think these are places where bridge tournaments are held. Why no Fresno? I give her a shake, enough to bring her up into a waking dream, enough to talk. It's like talking to a patient under light hypnosis.

"Why not Fresno?" I ask her, using the same quirky tone of her sleep-talking.

"You want me to stand around at the partnership table with all those other women?"

"Well, no," I say. I didn't think she'd been invited.

"I'd feel like a dance-hall hostess. For open pairing you just stand there while they look you over."

"I see."

"Noway."

I am silent. After a while her eyes stop moving. She's going to sleep but still talking.

"Schenken?" she murmurs, asking a question, I think.

"No," I say, not liking the sound of it.

"K.S.?"

"No."

"Roth-Steiner?"

"No."

"Azalea?"

"Yes." Azalea sounds better, whatever it is.

"Azalea," she murmurs drowsily, smiling, and as drowsily she straightens and turns on her stomach. Before I know what she's doing, she has swung around on the bed like a compass needle, dreamily but nonetheless expertly done a one-eighty, buckled and folded herself into me, her wiry head between my thighs.

We've not done this before either, but by now I'm not surprised and I'd just as soon.

When we've finished, she's quite content to nestle again and go to sleep. "No Fresno," she murmurs, does another one-eighty, settles into me.

"Very well," I say. "No Fresno."

I have an idea.

"Listen, Ellen. This is important." I drop the dream voice and get down to business-just as you talk to a patient after fifty minutes on the couch when she swings around ready to leave. "Are you listening?"

She's listening. She's turned her head enough to free up her good ear from the pillow. She's deaf in the other. It happened at Leroy Ledbetter's bar. I tell her about it.

On the way home I stopped at the Little Napoleon, but not, I thought at the time, for a drink.

The Little Napoleon is the oldest cottage in town. It hails from the days when lake boatmen used to drink with the drovers who loaded up the pianos and chandeliers on their ox carts bound from France via New Orleans to the rich upcountry plantations. It is the only all-wood bar in the parish, wood floor worn to scallops, a carved wood reredos behind the bar-a complex affair of minarets and mirrors. Two-hundred-year-old wood dust flies up your nostrils. The only metal is the brass rail and a fifty-year-old neon clock advertising Dixie beer. I decided I needed a drink after talking to Bob Comeaux.

The straight bourbon slides into my stomach as gently as a blessing. Things ease. It is one condition of my "parole" that I not drink. But things ease nevertheless.

I buy Leroy Ledbetter a drink. He drinks like a bartender: as one item in the motion of tending bar, wiping, arranging glasses, pouring the drink from the measuring spout as if it were for a customer, the actual drinking occurring almost invisibly, as if he had rubbed his nose, a magician's pass.

There is one other customer in the bar, sitting in his usual place at the ell, James Earl Johnson. He's been sitting there for forty years, never appearing drunk or even drinking, his long acromegalic Lincoln-like face inclined thoughtfully. He always appears sunk in thought. His face is wooden, fixed. It might be taken to be stiff and mean with drink, but it is not. Actually he's good-natured. In fact, he's nodding all the time, almost imperceptibly but solemnly, a grave and steadfast affirmation. He's got Parkinsonism and it gives him the nods, both hands rolling pills, and a mask of a face. He smiles, but it's under the mask.

"What seh, Doc," says James, as if he had seen me yesterday and not two years ago.

"All right. How you doing, James?"

"All right now!"

James comes from Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood in New York City. He was once a vaudeville acrobat and knew Houdini, Durante, and Cagney. He was with a Buff Hottle carnival that got stranded here fifty years ago. He liked it in Feliciana. So he stayed.

"What about Ben Gazzara?" I asked him years ago about an actor I admired, knowing that he too came from Hell's Kitchen.

James would always shrug Gazzara off. "He's all right. But Cagney was the one. There was nobody like Cagney." He nods away, affirming Cagney. "Do you want to know what Cagney was, what he really was?"

"What?" I would reply, though he had told me many times.

"Cagney was a hoofer."

"What about his acting, his gangster roles?"

"All right! But what he was was a hoofer, the best I ever saw." The only movie of Cagney's he had any use for was the one about George M. Cohan. "Did you see that, Doc?"

"Yes."

"Did you see him dance 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'?"

"Yes."

"You see!"

"You looking good, Doc," says Leroy. "A little thin but good. All you need is a little red beans and rice. But you in good shape. You been playing golf?"

"Not exactly. I've been taking care of a golf course, riding a tractor, cutting fairway and rough."

Leroy nods a quick acknowledgment of the courtesy of my oblique reply, which requires no comment from him and also relieves him of having to pretend I've not been away.

"You going to a funeral, Doc?" asks James, his face like a stone.

"Why no."

"You mighty dressed up for Saturday afternoon."

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the reredos, whose silvering is as pocked as a moonscape. It's true. I'm dressed up in my Bruno Hauptmann double-breasted seersucker. Why do I remind myself of an ungainly German executed fifty years ago?

Leroy buys me a drink and pours himself one. I knock mine back. It feels even better, warmth overlaying warmth. His disappears in a twinkling, hand brushing nose.

Leroy feels better too. He leans over and tells me about his safari. He owns a motor home, and he and his wife belong to a club of motor-home owners, ten other couples. They've just got back from Alaska. Last year, Disney World. Year before, Big Bend.

"Tell you what you do, Doc. You need a vacation, you and the missus. Ya'll take my Bluebird and head out west or to Disney World. Do you both a world of good. Take the kids. Here are the keys."

"Thank you, Leroy." I'm touched. He means it. His Bluebird is a top-of-the-line motor home, the apple of his eye. It cost more than his home, which is the second floor of the Little Napoleon. "I might take you up."

I tell Ellen about the Bluebird. I know she's listening because her head is turned, good ear clearing the pillow.

"Why don't we get in Leroy's Bluebird and drive out to Jackson Hole? The aspens will be turning. Do you remember camping at Jenny Lake?"

"I'm not going to Fresno alone."

I didn't think she was going to Fresno.

"We'll drive to Fresno and then come back by Jenny Lake."

"Not time."

"Not time enough? Why not?"

"Fresno is-twenty-one hundred miles." I look at her. I can see the slight bulge of her cornea move up like a marble under the soft pouch of her eyelid. "Jackson Hole is nine hundred miles northeast of Fresno."

"I see."

"Fresno is almost exactly in the geographical center of California."

"I see."

I turn out the light.

11. VAN DORN SHOWS UP bright and early Sunday morning, dressed in a Day-Glo jacket, a sun helmet in which he has stuck colorful flies. He's wearing waders.

"You won't need that jacket."