As if struck in the face by a flower, Jade swiftly lowers her gaze to her drink.

“What, you don’t think you’re beautiful?” I pursue.

Jade breathes strangely, something between a gasp and a sigh. Her eyes look porous, like charcoal.

“Come on,” I coax.

She takes one last long draw on her straw and-open sesame!-gives us all she’s got, a blue streak special complete with parentheticals she must have picked up from some rhetorical master somewhere.

“Only middle level,” she says. “Okay, maybe upper middle. (But not like Koreans in magazine, so stylish! I do not prejudice against Koreans, for they are a mother lode of TV stars.)”

I ask how she compares to, say, Cherry.

“Cherry is very pleasant, capable person,” she says. “Definitely not spy, in my belief. But Cherry does not always smell, is her only problem. I always try to smell. Wait, do I say this right? Smeil. Yes, smile.”

The food arrives. Larry takes one bite of his baby back ribs but loses interest and gestures that we should help ourselves from his plate. Jade turns her fork and spoon upside down to use as chopsticks for her mac ’n’ cheese and keeps chattering.

“Mao is genius, I think. If she come back now, not dead, she be very happy, because we Chinese are so strong and so rich! (Oh, sorry for saying ‘she.’ In China we have no different word for the man and woman. It all one word. So I say ‘he, she’-sorry!)”

“And would Ms. Mao allow Tibet to go free?” I ask, taking my knife to stab! stab! stab! through the bright glaze of Larry’s baby backs.

“Of course no, for it belong to us!” Jade exclaims, also gorging herself from my cousin’s plate, her face burning bright from this carnivore’s feast. “It’s not I think, it’s I know: a fact. I am feeling strongly about this! I stick to my gun!”

“Just one big happy family, eh?” I ask, savoring Larry’s bloody sauce, stuck to my front teeth.

“Is true, Chinese people are like my friendly relatives,” she says. “I call any old man ‘uncle’ or old lady ‘grandmother,’ because we are one family. It too bad you have nothing like this in your country! Are you sad?”

But in fact I’m not sad. It’s been a great day. We’ve established a rough timetable for Larry’s surgery. We’re on track for a new Princess. Larry’s wrapped Dr. X around his little finger. I’ve gotten out from under Larry’s thumb. My banquet toast of twenty-five years ago has come back to me intact. Nothing can wreck my mood: not even the news that it’s time to take Jade back to the train station.

“But so soon?” I protest. “The round-trip is longer than the time you stayed!”

“I schlep again soon. Bullet train so fast I come and go many quickies!” She looks around bewildered. “So where is evidence for this meal?”

I hold up the bill. She tries to snatch it but misses.

“My treat,” I say.

“Nice thought, but don’t even think it,” Larry says, snagging it from my fingers like one of those frogs with a lightning-fast tongue. It’s the first thing he’s said in an hour.

At the station I’m still not sad. I’ll see Jade again soon. Larry will somehow come around to springing for the surgery, whatever the cost. Everything seems doable, even the notion of transplanting a living organ from one human body into another. What’s the big deal? You slice it out of one person and you stitch it into another person. “Danny Boy” seems the right thing to hum as Larry and I walk Jade to her track.

“Thank you again,” I tell her.

“Don’t always say ‘sank you,’” she says with impatience. “Normally in my country, if you are friends or you are family, you do not say.”

“Oh, it’s understood, like ‘I love you,’” I say.

“Yes, too stupid to say.”

I stand corrected. Not to say reprimanded. But nothing can wreck my mood. I push her shoulder slightly. “I nudge you,” I say.

“Exactly!” she says, looking pleased as she pushes my shoulder slightly back. Emboldened suddenly, she reaches her fingertips to my chin. “I do?” she asks, touching my goatee experimentally. It’s the first time she’s dared to touch my face, but she must feel safe, because we’re well chaperoned by our Spanish duenna. “So like wire,” she says and shivers slightly. “I think this night I will have sweet dreams,” she says.

I do not answer this. It’s in my wedding vows.

From an invisible distance, trains chug, firecrackers ignite.

Down the lonely platform, we see a fuzzy figure all by herself, swaggering under many pieces of luggage. The poor thing must have missed her train or be lost or something. But now the figure is waving, making noises, all but yodeling to us. Let’s listen:

“Larry-Mary! Mary-Larry!”

I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming? Swaying under her baggage, sweating like a rhino in Larry’s mother’s fur coat, it’s Mary, returned from her open pit of a city near the Korean border, back to her beloved. “I bring you mashed!” she says, waving a bag of KFC.

“Huwwo, Mary,” Larry says evenly as he accepts a hug without emotion. “I thought not till next week. Any case, thank you for coming.”

We wave Jade off on her train. We bring Mary back with us in a cab.

One woman out, one woman in.

“Danny Boy” dies in my throat. I was wrong. There was something that could wreck my mood.

Quarreling is like cutting water with a sword.

So now we are three again. A new three. Group dynamics have changed. The Gang of Two rules the suite.

The only way a truce can work is for Larry and me to give each other as wide a berth as possible. Immediately we set up some house rules. The door between our two rooms is to remain closed. He seals his and Mary’s room so it can stay tropically heated; I allow mine to cool at night by keeping my windows open. When we need to initiate communication, we’ll use the phone. Or at the very least knock. Larry accepts the conditions, but not happily.

“You make me sound like a manipulator even to myself, Dan, as though I planned this arrangement. Did I ask for Mary and you and me to end up in the same cell block? Go home if you want. Leave me to my own devices. I don’t care. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

The preceding was for rhetorical purposes only; we both understand the situation. Luckily, there are still reserves of goodwill that we can draw upon, and the door clicks cordially between us. All that can be heard is the sound of the lullaby piped in overhead through the soft-speakers. Three blind mice, three blind mice…

No, actually that’s not the only sound that can be heard. The passage of hours, then days, brings further intimacies, as I discover to my chagrin that I can’t avoid overhearing the housekeeping between them.

“I’ll brush my hair myself, Mary… Because I like brushing my hair, that’s why…”

See how they run, see how they run…

Mealtimes are always interesting. The din from Chez Larry-Mary usually begins with the popping open of a Coke can, punctuated by celestial screeches from Mary when she gets ambushed each time by a burst of fizz in her face. Then even happier sounds as she drops two or three artificial sweeteners into her brew and savors the result. “Goooooooooood…” Then domestic tranquillity, for a while, as they settle into their meal and work out mutual misunderstandings in their own way.

Mary: “What is?”

Larry: “McFish of some sort, except the KFC variety. Can you hand me my Blistex…no, not my reading glasses…thank you…”

Silence. Contrapuntal chewing.

“Mary, can you open another Coke for me?…I would happily do it myself, Mary, if I were strong enough… Thank you, Mary… On the subject of fish, can you ask the nurse what kind of fish this medicine comes from? I can see from the illustration on the box it’s supposed to swim in water, but-”

“Fish.”

“I know that, but what sort of fish?”