"Hi," he said, in a friendly sort of fashion.

"Where's last month's alimony check?" Kate said.

Joe said, "I'm onto something. I'll be able to pay all my back alimony if this—"

"This what?" Kate interrupted. "Some new nuthead idea dredged out of the depths of what you call your brain?"

"A note," he said. "I want to read it to you to see if you can infer anything more from it than I can." His ex-wife, although he hated her for it—and for a lot more—had a quick mind. Even now, a year after their divorce, he still relied on her powerful intellect. It was odd, he had once thought, that you could hate a person and never want to see them again, and yet at the same time seek them out and ask their advice. Irrational. Or, he thought, is it a sort of superrationality? To rise above hate...

Wasn't it the hate which was irrational? After all, Kate had never done anything to him—nothing except make him excessively aware, intently aware, always aware, of his inability to bring in money. She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.

And he still called up and asked for her advice.

He read her the note.

"Obviously it's illegal," Kate said. "But you know your business affairs don't interest me. You'll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you're currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn't know any better, who doesn't have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have."

"What do you mean ‘illegal'?" he asked. "What kind of pot is illegal?"

"Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war."

"Oh Christ," he said; he hadn't thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.