“Yeah, was she nice?”

“Attractive, very stylish, wore dark-tinted glasses all the time, and had the whitest skin I ever saw. She was maybe forty-two or three.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“Her name was Betty Barr, she was the advertising manager. Only the other models and the photographer and his helpers all called her Bettybarr, like it was one name. I don’t know why but I had trouble with that, so I didn’t call her anything. We’d start in the morning and shoot all day, outside, at different locations. Jackson Square, naturally, Audubon Park, the lighthouse on the New Basin Canal, the docks down at Lafitte, Jesus, with the Cajun shrimpers standing there watching. Here we are posing, this group of us, like we’re happier’n shit to have these outfits on, warm-ups, rugby shirts… This other guy, Michael, who never said one fucking word to me, it didn’t seem to bother him at all he looked like an asshole. You see the shrimpers making remarks. Or the girls, it didn’t bother them, they were kids, sixteen, seventeen…” Jack touched his glass. “Why don’t you hit this again. Just vodka.”

Mario stepped down the bar to get the bottle and Jack remembered the girls. The girls had no trouble becoming an instant part of it, slouching into poses with deadpan expressions or smiling or looking surprised. They fascinated him, their studied moves, girls being models, nothing else, able to lose themselves in their poses. He said to the girls, an aside, “You imagine a guy wearing this?” And the girls said, “Really.” He liked them when they were posing and they liked him when he wasn’t.

Mario returned and poured and Jack said, “We’re out by Tulane, I have these real bright green fucking pants on with a pink shirt, the little tulip on it, and right there on Saint Charles Avenue these South Central Bell hardhats are digging up the street. Naturally they start making remarks, yelling different things.