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went to a Halloween party dressed as garbage, with a milk carton pinned to her T-shirt, orange peels and shredded plastic wrap in her hair; at the party she opened a toy garbage can and dumped paper on the rug. The silence, the guests’ blank faces—it’s how Vera pictures Frank and Dan’s reaction to her in a rainbow Afro wig.
    She’s thinking of the winter Lowell scratched his cornea and so complained about people staring at his eyepatch that Vera bought him a grinning, pop-eyed Froggy the Gremlin mask. She was shocked when he seemed hurt by this new evidence of her hard-heartedness. If her heart were so hard, it wouldn’t have been broken by this sign of how far they’d come from the days when he’d have hung that frog mask by the door and never gone out without it. Even now the memory’s painful enough to make her just stop, causing a slight pedestrian pileup that leaves her directly in front of the New Napoli Restaurant.
    Outside, a speaker’s playing a Muzak mariachi version of “South of the Border.” “Mission bells told me I shouldn’t stay…” Why not? Vera wonders, wishing she knew the rest of the song. Is it violence, or just faded love? Perhaps she’s confusing it with “El Paso” or Touch of Evil or countless lurid border stories that only a trashy This Week sensibility would care about in the first place. Still, she can’t help swaying slightly to those xylophone dips and glides.
    In the window, Vinnie’s spinning pizza dough on his fists. He catches Vera’s eye, smiles, then looks away. Vinnie’s shy and handsome and such a flirt that sometimes Vera’s chest gets tight and it feels like the start of real love. Now she wonders if it’s possible to build a marriage on that: shy smiles and great pizza. Last year Vinnie’s pizza was written up in New York magazine, and for a while the place was crowded with upscale types. But the crowds moved on even before the blown-up magazine clipping came back from the printer. Mounted in plastic, gathering dust in the window, the clipping reminds Vera of a whole class of This Week stories, all variations on the theme of “too late”: Delayed letters arriving from GIs dead fifteen years, grieving mothers receiving hospital gift portraits of newborns who never made it home from neonatal intensive care.
    Vera orders eggplant parmesan and a dark Heineken and brings them to her table. The eggplant is rich and generous with melted cheese; that and the ice-cold beer should make her feel better. But just to make sure they don’t, she takes Lowell’s letter from her purse. Rereading it till she knows it by heart, she’s trying—as she’s always done with Lowell—to read in something that just isn’t there.
    The soundtrack has segued from “South of the Border” to “Tijuana Taxi.” Shutting it out, Vera thinks back to the time she went to San Francisco to visit Louise. Substituting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for Herb Alpert is all it takes to bring back those New Age wood-and-hanging-plant greasy spoons where she lunched with Louise’s tofu-brained friends, who would sooner have choked on their beansprouts than ask an uptight East Coast question like What do you do for a living? Unasked, Vera volunteered the fact she wrote other people’s stories. Other people’s stories? Really, they said. You’ve got to meet Lowell.
    And where was Lowell? Off in some Bombay opium den, some Karachi hashish parlor, guiding some rich French junkie on a narcotics tour of Asia. While back at home, friends with barely enough energy to gum their guacamole jumped at the chance to tell his life story: how he was born to Arkansas Holy Rollers; how his father became a government engineer and was posted four hundred miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, to work on the DEW line; how he lived ten years in a log cabin with Mom and Dad and six kids and huskies and dogsleds, until his father was transferred down to Portland, where Lowell discovered his true calling, selling pot;