I’d hoped it would be sunnier this far inland, but the sky was stuill gray, the air still cool, and my bathing suit stayed in my bag. The pool didn’t look very inviting anyway. It was murky, and there was some sort of bot crawling around on th bottom, an automatic pool cleaner I guess. Instead I watched a ping-pong game with two agents slamming the ball at each other. I heard someone beside me gasp and looked up to see a rat running along the top of the backyard fence.

But the food that Portia had prepared the day before was very good — barbecued chicken breasts, salads, pork loins… I ate at a table with the company’s star broker (Blond, part-time actor, desk shaggy with stacked papers and files) At one point Rose invited me to walk around with her and look at the house. We went down to the wine cellar, which was as brightly lit and new and dustless as the rest of the house.

Kay and Lou and others from admin played poker at one of the tables by the pool. One of the male agents, a jowly man in his sixties, ventured into the pool, mainly walking around in the water up to his chest, but occasionally plunging foward to swim in strong, overhand strokes.

The sun lowered. The musicians began packing their instruments. Janey (dark-haired peppery agent who had waged an unrelenting war against Yovanna) offered me and Lara a ride back into the city. We waited in the front living room for her to bring her car around, listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland on the CD, and I contemplated the framed WWII era advertisements on the wall. Weirdly, what looked like a large building cornice in the shape of an eagle, large enough to qualify as another piece of furniture, rested on the floor beside the sofa.

A rat running along the top of a fence is not an unusual sight in California suburbs. It’s why Hanta virus is a real concern in this state — most recently in the headlines again after the terrible deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife in Southern Cal.