They shred the State Bird of Texas and leave it on the porch. The feet are in a separate pile. Betty says she hates the cats, they're dirty, infested and multiplying, and to please her he agrees. He agrees with everything she says and she still comes home in a fighting mood, tucking her legs up under her dress and repeating every joke she can remember about how lawyers are like sharks, roaches, catfish, gutless bottom-feeders, because she puts things in files for them all day and takes things out of files for them all day and is not often appreciated or even looked at, in her fresh dresses, in her sweet 1950s cat-eyed glasses that make her look like a sexy librarian in an educational film. John decides he'll love her anyway, for the sake of her clothes, for her dainty feet and for the mole on her neck, though she is in every other respect distant and spiteful.
    She says she's never stopped thinking about some other guy. Someone less nice than he is, who rides a Harley.
    He says, "Fuck you, Betty" and likes it so much he says it again. He says "women" like some venomous husband on an old sitcom and with this uxorious pronouncement loves her all over again: smitten, fucked up, gone.
    He spends the days driving around, the land stretching out flat in all directions. Why are there no horses in Texas? No cowboys, no hitching posts, no dinner bells clanging at dusk? He pulls over and buys a donut from Vietnamese immigrants at the Wagon Wheel Donut Shop. He gets the oil in the Caddy changed at a Jiffy Lube — an entire franchise with heavy equipment and credit card verification entrusted to the care of teenage boys. The West spreads out before him, a grid of mini- malls, postal centers and check cashing joints squatting beneath the sunset, the sky crisscrossed by jet streams as orange as poster paint. She lets him fuck her about half the time. He cannot flat-out ask. He cannot murmur any endearments or words of lust. He must wait until she's half asleep and then come up on her from behind, pressing against her in a casual, aloof way; and then act as though he is really asleep and so not actually possessing any desire.

He lets his hands wander all over her cotton panties until he feels a wet spot spreading toward the hem. At which point she'll usually let him do whatever he can think of.
    She has brought him here as though she wanted him for something, but maybe she doesn't want him. Maybe she wants something else. A wheel and not a donut.
    One of the cats that turns up on the porch seems to be at least half-tame. He finds Betty standing on the welcome mat, clucking to her. The cat cringes under an old chair and meows. John gives her a saucerful of milk, like the boy scout he once was.
    "You're not supposed to give them milk," Betty says.
    "Why not?"
    She thinks it over. "Because they like it."
    The cat is black and silky, a real Breck girl. Once she's tasted milk her personality transforms. She sits outside on the porch all day and cries and cries to come inside. She's relentless. Every time they crack open the door, she makes her face very sweet, very heart-shaped and soft, and emits a pure, high-pitched meeee. If they move to another room, the cat follows and pleads from outside the window. Finally Betty relents and lets her in. She sniffs the baseboards. She crawls under the bed and emerges loaded with dust.
    Then the cat sits in front of the back door and cries and cries to be let back out.


The emptiness of days spent on unemployment is wearing John down. He's left everything behind for Betty — maybe it was not the most brilliant career but it was something; a little design business, a little D.J.ing on the side, a life full of style if not cash.

He ditched it for her without a second thought; she crooked her finger and he pulled up his pants and ran, a chump for love, like all of his friends, guys from college who'd been made fools of, a whole club of guys jerked from the end of a whip by one girl or another, beautiful girls with histories of abuse or mistreatment, the flamboyant ones, the ones that needed everything and then fled when they got it, wild and smart but stupid about life; stupid, stupid—and the boys too, all of them, stupid. It was glorious. The boys were in Rhode Island. He was broke.
    At night they take walks when the heat is bearable.