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An hour after Stannie's first conversation with Ed, he sat by his producer friend's pool, drinking sour, cold coffee. It was the dregs from a pot in the poolhouse. He chased it down with a strawberry daquiri wine cooler which he'd also found in the poolhouse. It tasted even worse than the coffee, and it made his teeth slimy, like melting popsickles. He knew he smelled rank. He stripped off his clothes and jumped into the pool, swam a few laps, then lay back, floating naked, slowly turning and watching the one cloud in the sky go around and around like the dial on a timer.

He'd lost his desire to stalk Brett Bordley–Young. The romance there had faded, the blush was off the rose. He didn't hate anyone at the moment: neither former Mousketeers, nor his mother and father, nor his uncle, nor the PGA nor Tom McLeesh nor Jesse Helms nor the hundreds of other people he despised under normal circumstances. He felt no ruptures and he felt no ties. He was free now. It was the kind of cold freedom he could write an article about and receive letters from women all over the country who wanted to teach him about the milk of human kindness: then maybe he'd follow one home and call her up later to see if she was, indeed, ample in that department. But for the time being, most people still thought he was missing, and that suited him fine.

He did dare to ask himself, just for a moment, "How do I feel about Rose?" but he was able to let the thought of her slip away, like water over his skin. "And my real mother?" he wondered. "How do I feel about her?"

A strange sensation passed over him when he thought of Ernetta. He saw her for a second, telling him goodbye from a corner of that ugly little trailer, with tears in her eyes; then Rose came suddenly to his mind again, like a body bobbing up from a lake. He felt something seize inside him. It was a dangerous thing to let your thoughts run loose like this, but what else could you do while floating nude in an ice–cold pool? Somehow the two women were connected in his emotions.

Women … now he thought of a night when he was about ten and his mother (not the real one, obviously) came downstairs to his room when she was drunk and crawled in bed with him and sobbed hysterically for an hour, with her lumpy, soft back jerking against her side. It wasn't the first time she'd done it: it had happened before, but this time he felt completely ashamed. For that whole hour, he gritted his teeth in a kind of cold panic, hating her and wanting her out of his room. He might have killed her just to make her shut up, if he'd had a gun or a knife under his pillow. After that night he always locked his door. No wonder he had problems. No wonder he'd been wasting his time stalking some teen queen when he could be getting a shave and a shower and heading over to a friend's house to be the toast of the town. Yet here he was.

And why hadn't the phone rung yet? Ed had promised to call back. This was like waiting for the devil to call. Stannie snickered, thinking of himself as the son of Satan, then floated around the pool for awhile and nearly fell asleep. He kept his eyelids half open, drifting in and out of little dreams about nothing.

When the phone did ring on the patio (it chimed the first few bars of Rhapsody in Blue), he took his time getting to it. He dragged himself up from the water and stretched in the sun. He'd always liked being naked in the open. He did a little dance and then craned his neck to see over the privacy fence, but the neighbor's house was too far away. They'd have to miss the show. He picked up the phone and held it in his hand for a moment while the water streamed down his legs and made a blue puddle on the mosaic tile (iris pattern, designed by one of L.A.'s best).

"Hello?" said Ed on the other end. "Where are you?"

"That's none of your business."

"Now why you want to hurt my feelings?"

"I couldn't care less about your feelings."

"That ain't true. We've always had a good understanding between us. Remember when you was home from college?"

"So why are you calling me, Ed?"

"That was the time you stole money outen your uncle's golf bag. I seen you take it and I put in a hundred dollar bill, my own money, to keep you out of trouble."

"I never stole anything from my uncle."

"I ain't tole nobody. I ain't told your daddy about your marijuana smoking or that little 15–year–old cheerleader you did under the back patio. I ain't told nobody nothing, ever. See, I'm on your side, A.J."

"Stop calling me that."

"I love you, A.J. Whatever you say to me, I still love you."

Stannie was quiet.