“That’s quite a dream. Try half a milligram of Xanax before retiring.”

“But what does itmean, Doc?”

“It means there’s static in there during REM sleep while your brain transfers material from short-term into long-term memory and your cortex interprets the static into factitious incident. It’s like hearing music in the hum of a fan or seeing pictures in clouds. The brain is a pattern-making organ. The patterns don’t have to have any meaning.”

“I know, that’s what you always say, but get this: okay, I go to see what’s up with Amy. She tells me she had a nightmare about an animal trying to eat her, the bad kind where you think you woke up but you’re still in the dream. So I calm her down a little and she goes for her animal book and makes me read it to her and she picks out the animal. From her dream.”

“You’re going to say it was a leopard, right?”

“A jaguar. What do you think of that?”

“A coincidence.”

“That’s your professional medical opinion? A coincidence?”

Lola did a little eye rolling here. “Yes, of course! What else could it be, mind travel?”

“Or something. I always forget you have this weirdness-deficit thing.”

“It’s called reason, Jimmy. The rational faculty of mankind. What are you doing?”

“Interfering with you. Running my hands inside your pathetic stained chenille bathrobe. Checking to see if it’s still there. Oh, yes. What do you think of that, Doctor?”

Lola closed her eyes and sagged against him. She said, “This is so mean of you when I have to work.”

“A quickie. Get up on the counter.”

“What about Amy?”

“I gave her powerful drugs,” he said, “barbiturates, brown heroin,” and lifted her onto the Formica.

She said, “This is what I get for marrying a Cuban.”

“What, Jews don’t fuck on the kitchen counter?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll ask around,” she said as his mouth closed down on hers. For a while she forgot about her pile of work, and he forgot about dreams.

Lola Wise Paz was at this period a resident in neuropsychiatry at South Miami Hospital, a short bicycle ride from her home. She’d owned a doctorate in clinical psychology when she and Jimmy Paz hooked up, and she’d borne the child, and then, in something of a panic about time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near, she had decided to go to medical school at age thirty-four. Paz had backed her play in this, and the two of them had worked like cart horses to make a living, clear time for study, and do the endless tasks of parenthood, helped in this last by the mighty Margarita Paz, the Abuela of Doom. Now, as on most mornings, after Lola had pedaled off, Paz got the kid dressed and fed, delivered her to the first grade at Providence Day School, went to the restaurant, prepped lunch, and cooked much of it. Meanwhile, the Abuela picked up Amelia and brought her to the restaurant Guantanamera. Grandmotherly affections, it appeared, proved even stronger than the desire to exert total control over her restaurant during every single minute it was open. When the lunch rush had declined to a trickle of orders, Paz found his offspring trying on a cook’s apron that the grandmother had apparently altered to fit her. Paz looked the tiny prep cook over with a professional eye. To his mother he said, “She looks good. Why don’t we let her handle the lunch tomorrow? We wouldn’t have to pay her because she’s just a little kid.”

“I do too get paid!” Amelia protested. “Abuela gave me a dollar.”

“Okay, but lay off the booze and cigarettes unless you want to be three feet tall your whole life. And ticklish.”

After the shrieks had subsided, Paz set her up with a pan of radishes to be carved into roses. When she was settled, he went to talk to his mother. Margarita Paz was a black peasant from Guantánamo and still bore as she closed in on sixty the marks of that origin: strong arms, wide hips, a bosom like a shelf, and a hard, calculating stare. She dressed in bright colors and lipsticks and nail polishes that set off her shiny chocolate skin; a turban was often on her head, as now. Paz had always been a little afraid of her; he knew no one who was not, except his daughter.

“The produce was garbage today,” she said when he came into her little box of an office. “Talk to Moreno, and tell him we’re definitely going to switch to Torres Brothers if it happens again. Tell him his father never treated us like Americans.”

“I’ll take care of it, Mamí,” said Paz, although the produce was prime as always. Complaining and snapping orders was her way of showing affection. “Look, I wanted to ask you…Amelia’s been having nightmares, and she wakes up screaming at night, and when I tell her not to worry, that the monsters in the dreams aren’t real, what do I get? Abuela says theyare real. I wish you wouldn’t tell her stuff like that, okay?”

“You want me to lie to my granddaughter?”

“It upsets her. She’s too young to be worrying about all that.”

“And what about you? Are you also too young?”

Paz took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start with this now, Mamí. Santería is your thing, we’re not going to get involved in it. Not me, and definitely not Amelia.”

“What kind of dreams?” asked his mother, ignoring this last, as she did any statement she chose not to hear.

“That’s not important. We don’t want you telling her stuff like that.”

She shot him a sharp look; it was that “we.” Mrs. Paz had always imagined that when her son finally brought home a daughter-in-law, she would be a girl amenable to direction, as was only right. Instead, she got an American doctor with insane ideas about child rearing. A doctor! Theman should be the doctor, and the woman should take care of the children, emphasis on the plural, and listen to hersuegra with respect, or else how was society to continue? But this daughter-in-law had been so bold as to state, on more than one occasion, that if Margarita insisted on inducting the girl into “your cult” she would have to reconsider letting her spend so much time with her grandmother, and all because a few little charms, anide for her small wrist, the sacrifice of a few birds in order to cast the child’s future and protect her from danger…absurd, and especially after all she had done for them. It did not occur to her to wonder why her son had chosen a woman precisely as stubborn and hardheaded as his mother.

She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “All right! What can I do, I’m just an old woman, it’s perfectly all right to ignore me. I never expected after the life I’ve lived, to end up being despised like this, but let it be! I won’t say another word to the child, ever. Take her away!” Here she removed a bright silk hankie from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

“Come on, Mamí, don’t make me crazy. It’s not like that and you know it…”

“But,” she said, and now fixed him with her terrible eye, “but there is something.” Here a gesture, hands like birds, conjuring the unseen.

“What something?”

“Something”-darkly-“there is something moving in theorun, I don’t know what it is, but something very powerful, and it has to do with you, my son, and with her. Yes, you think I’m stupid, but I know what I know.”

There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Paz kissed his mother on the cheek and went out.

“That’s a good rose,” he said to his daughter, “but you need to slice the petals thinner so they’ll flop over and be more like a real flower. Look, watch me.” With which he picked up a parer and an icy, crisp radish from the pan and in eight seconds whipped it into a blossom.

Amelia looked coldly at the proffered garnish. “I prefer it the wayI do it,” she said, showing yet again how close to the tree fell the fruit among the tribe of Paz.

Some hours later, Paz was again sweating over a grill, but now he had taken on a load of his own banana daiquiri and was feeling pretty fine. The grill stood on his own patio, and on it sizzled and smoked several racks of Cuban-style barbecued pork ribs, marinated in lime juice, cumin, oregano, and sherry. Amelia had set the picnic table for five, a seafood and endive salad had been prepped and was now cooling in the refrigerator, in company with two magnums of fairly drinkable Spanish white and a dozen little pots of flan. He had a tape going,guajira music, Arsenio Rodriguez, that floated out through the windows of the Florida room and mixed with the sweet smoke from the grill. Paz before marriage had hardly ever cooked at home, and his social life had consisted of presex activities only. Lola had become more social since the M.D. came through, and they had people over almost every week. He didn’t mind cooking for these events, nor did he mind Lola’s friends. She did not hang out with people apt to patronize him. Before his marriage, Paz had acquired virtually all his knowledge of the intellectual world from pillow talk. He dated bright women only, showed them a good time, provided plenty of athletic sex, and afterward sucked out their brains, for although he was natively bright, he had no patience for sitting in a classroom listening to the professorial drone, or for poring over texts, or for being tested. He had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was fed only via the audio channel, and could produce, during these dinner parties, remarks that were surprising from the mouth of a high school grad cook and former cop. He was inordinately pleased when this occurred, as was his wife, the intellectual snob. At such times he could see it on her face: look, he’s not just a stud.