I didn’t think much about it then. I only realized I was in trouble when they started playing music together. Sally spends so much time at the piano every day, working or practicing, that she just about never touches it for fun. She used to, sometimes, with Norris, when he lived with us—I remember they used to do old stuff, Beatles, or rhythm and blues, clowning around together to crack me up. But once they split up, she quit all that, never again—that fast, that flat. And now here was Evan coming over with somebody’s beat-up classical guitar, and the two of them waking me up at night singing English and I guess Irish folk songs. He was all right, nothing much, about like me on piano. But they were having a great time, you could tell. I could tell, lying there listening in the dark.

Of course he was over practically every day after they got engaged. They’d order pizza and sit in the kitchen talking about finding a place in London, because Evan’s old flat wouldn’t be nearly big enough, and about where I’d go to school, and where Sally might teach regularly, instead of freelancing the way she did here. I didn’t talk if I could avoid it, and I really tried not to even listen. I think I felt that if I ignored everything that was going on, maybe none of it would actually happen. Mister Cat is terrific at that. All the same, I still couldn’t help picking up a few things, whether I wanted to or not, and some of them didn’t sound that terrible. London, for instance. London sounded pretty much like NewYork, give or take, with all kinds of crazies wandering around, and all kinds of at least interesting stuff going on everywhere. And I even started to think, well, okay, just maybe I could handle London. If I absolutely had to.

Sally told me Evan had custody of his two boys, the way she did of me—they were staying with his sister while he was over here— so I knew they’d be living with us, and that was about all I knew. He showed us four million Polaroids, of course, a whole suitcase full. One of the boys was just a baby, nine or ten—that was Julian— but the other one, Tony, was a couple of years older than me, and Evan said he was a dancer, been a dancer practically since the day he was born. Wonderful. I love him already.