The next evening Jules stood hesitantly before the front door of Maureen’s French Quarter town house, fidgeting as nervously as a boy about to pick up his prom date. For the first time in years, he found himself wishing he could see his reflection in a mirror. He spat in his palms and slicked down his unruly hair as best he could. Then he brushed the last few flecks of dirt from his threadbare sport coat. It would have to do. Finally, he lifted the big brass pineapple-shaped knocker and let it crash against the door’s cracked red paint.

A few moments later, he heard a slow, heavy tread approaching the door. After a few seconds of queasy silence, three balky dead bolts clicked, and the door opened.

Maureen’s nose twitched violently. She made no effort to disguise her revulsion. “Oh. My. Gawd.”

“Hi, baby.” Jules smiled weakly. “It’s good to see you.”

Maureen stepped back quickly from the doorway. She pointed curtly in the direction of the bathroom. “Shower. Now.”

“Don’t I even get a ‘hello’?”

“Scrape that toxic waste off your hide and I’ll consider it. Bathroom’s through there. Drop all your things through the big chute in the hallway. And I meaneverything.”

Jules stepped inside. He briefly considered trying for a hug, but the fact that she was eyeing him as though he were a gigantic cockroach changed his mind. He walked down the hallway until he came to the chute and began peeling off his clothes. He dropped his coat on the polished cedar floor; a cloud of gray dust swirled around his ankles. His shirt clung to him like a massive strip of cellophane wrap. He opened the chute, which was big enough to stuff a body through, and peered inside before dropping in his wadded-up shirt, pants, and socks. A wave of heat hit his face from the darkness below.

“Hey, baby, where does this thing lead to? The laundry?”

“No. The incinerator.” She picked up his coat with a pair of fireplace tongs. “Reach in and take out your wallet,” she commanded. Jules obediently followed orders. Then she dropped the coat through the opening.

“Hey! That’s my best sport coat!”

“Not anymore,” she said, prodding him toward the bathroom with her tongs.

After half an hour of scrubbing himself beneath a scalding, high-pressure cascade, Jules began to feel vaguely human again. Every few minutes Maureen’s pudgy hand would appear through the shower curtain, handing him a series of astringent soaps and shampoos to use. Finally, she reached in and turned off the hot water, signaling that he was allowed to come out.

After he toweled himself off, she handed him a fluffy pink robe through the door. He was surprised by how well it fit. He searched through her drawers until he found a razor (a lady’s razor, but it would have to do), then felt his way through an uneven shave. Failing to find any aftershave, he wet down his hands with some of Maureen’s perfume and patted it onto his semismooth, but burning, cheeks and neck.

He found Maureen waiting for him in the kitchen, pouring the contents of several plastic bowls into a tall blender. “Your friend the cabdriver was worried sick about you,” she said, scraping what looked like raw eggs into the blender with a wooden spoon.

“Erato? He was worried about me?”

“Yeah, Erato, that’s the one. He came looking for me at the club the night after your house burned down. He thought I might know where you’d disappeared to.” She flicked on the blender for twenty seconds, then poured the contents into a large glass and handed it to him. “Here. Drink up. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

Jules eyed the reddish mixture uncertainly. “What’s in this?”

“Egg whites, Italian stewed tomatoes, okra, mirlitons, V8 juice, and a little Tabasco sauce. Oh, and blood, of course.”

Jules winced slightly and set the glass on a table. “Sounds to me like a surefire recipe for the runs. Uh, thanks for goin‘ to all that trouble for me, but can’t I just have some blood by itself?”

Maureen sank her fists aggressively into her billowy hips and stared Jules down. “Jules Duchon, you’re going to drink that mixture and you’re going to like it.”

“But, Mo, aside from coffee, I ain’t been able to tolerate normal food in years-”

“Well, consider this a start, mister! You need to lose weight and get yourself healthy!Especially now! What, you think you can just waltz back into town and go back to all your old bad habits like nothing’s happened? You might as well just waddle down the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard with a great big target painted on your chest. A sign that says,KILL ME NOW-I’M TOO FAT ANDstupidTO TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. Sure! Let’s go visit this Malice X of yours right now and save him the trouble of looking for you.”

“Aww, Mo-”

She slapped his hands away, then knelt down and feigned breaking a leg off one of her kitchen chairs. “Better yet, I’ll just sharpen up a wooden stake for you-right here, tonight-and you can plunge it through your heart yourself. Wouldn’t that be faster and easier?” She yanked more strenuously, and the leg began to crack. “Huh? Wouldn’t it?”

He leaned down and pulled her hands away from the chair, as gently as he could. “C’mon, stop it. Just calm down, huh? Look-I’ll drink your concoction, okay? Here. Watch me.” He lifted the glass to his lips and downed its contents in four mighty gulps, forcibly suppressing both his gag reflex and a series of shudders.

Maureen appeared at least partially mollified by his efforts. “Good,” she said, taking the glass from him and rinsing it in the sink. “My house, my rules. The one hundred percent blood I keep in the fridge is strictly off-limits to you. Understand? If I come home some evening to find that you’ve been sneaking any, you’ll be out on the street again before you’ve even had time to belch. You clear on that?”

“Like glass, baby.”

“Yeah, you’d better be.” She reached over and smoothed the wrinkles from the shoulders of his robe, then brushed a stray thread from his cheek with a surprisingly gentle flick of her fingertips. “Heh. You actually look pretty good in that robe of mine. But I guess we’d better get you some new clothes of your own.”

Jules allowed himself to smile, even as he fought to ignore the small-scale tropical disturbance in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah, I guess we better, seein‘ as how you just burned up the last set of clothes I had to my name.”

They drove up Canal Street to Krauss’s. The grand old department store at the corner of Canal and Basin, just outside the French Quarter, was in the final months of its “Going Out of Business” sale. Jules and Maureen had both shopped there often over the years, due to the store’s tradition of late closing times and its well-stocked Big-and-Tall (Men’s) and Youthful Stouts (Women’s) Clothing Departments.

Jules parked his Lincoln behind the store, within spitting distance of the vaguely menacing apartment blocks of the Lafitte Housing Project. Slamming his creaking door shut, he couldn’t help but notice how much at home his car looked against the backdrop of boarded-up windows and exposed, broken pipes. A gust of wind blew through the parking lot, and Jules pulled his reluctantly borrowed wig lower around his ears to keep it from blowing away. The edges of his muumuu were lifted up around his trunklike thighs so that for a second he looked like a Daliesque Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grating inThe Seven Year Itch.

Maureen noticed Jules’s pained expression. “Oh, like I told you, there’s no need to get all embarrassed. This dump’s going out of business any day now, so it’s not like you’ll ever be seeing any of these salesclerks again, anyway.” She grabbed his hand and hustled him toward the rear entrance. “And besides, ‘Julia’ my dear, with you in that getup, there’s much less chance of some unfriendly bat-boy noticing that you’ve come back into town.”