There were two and three of them a day in those first steaming days of June. Pom was delighted with the humane traps. The poison put down by the exterminating company had worked even better, but the rats had all died in the walls and for almost a month before we tried the traps the house smelled like a charnel house, sick-sweet and a pestilential. We’d had to cancel several meetings and a dinner party. The exterminators had promised that the rats would all go outside to die, but none of them had, and Pom was furious with both man and beast.

“Why the hell aren’t they going outside?” he said over and over.

“Would you, if you could die in a nice warm pile of insulation?” I said. “Why on earth did either of us believe they’d go outside? Why would they? They probably start to feel the pain almost immediately. They’re not going to run a 10K with arsenic in their guts.”

I hated the poisoning. I hated the thought of the writhing and the squeaking and scrabbling and dying. I never actually heard it, but somehow that was even worse. My mind fashioned grand guignol dances of death nightly behind my Sheetrock. I took to leaving the radio on softly all night, in fear that I would hear. The only result of that was that I would come awake at dawn with my heart jolting when the morning deejay started his drive-time assault and would lie there blearily for long seconds, wondering if it had been the phone I heard, or Pom’s beeper, or Glynn calling, or some new banshee alarm from Mommee upstairs. Only when I had listened for a couple of minutes did it sink in that I was hearing Fred the Undead blasting Atlanta out of bed and onto the road.

As early as I wakened on those mornings, Pom was invariably up earlier and was almost always gone to the clinic by the time I padded into the kitchen in search of coffee. I would find his usual note propped up against the big white Braun coffeemaker: “Merritt: 3 more, 2, in lv. rm. and 1 in libr. Call A. about Fri, I think there’s something. Blue blazer in cleaners? Worm capsules, 2 @. Mommee restless last night, check and call me. Home late, big bucks in town. See you A.M. if not P.M. XXX, P.”