Emma stands up, fuming and spectacular. "You're unbelievable, Jack, getting a doctor to lie for you!"

Murkily I confide to having heavy connections in the gastrointestinal field. "But give me ten days on Jimmy Stoma," I say, "and I'll go see Old Man Polk at once."

"A week. That's all you get," Emma relents. "And we never had this conversation, understand? I was never here."

"Right. And you never ogled my bare alabaster calves. Hey, I'm about to pulp some oranges—stay for juice."

"Rain check," Emma says curtly.

At the door I hear myself thanking her, for what I can't imagine. She pockets the reading glasses in favor of snazzy blue Ray-Bans, new driving shades. "Look," she says. "I really am sorry about that a-hole remark."

"Nonsense. We're bonding, that's all. We're a work in progress."

"Juan says you keep a lizard in your kitchen freezer. Can that possibly be true?"

"An extremely large lizard, yes. Would you care to see?"

"Under no circumstances, Jack," Emma says with a guarded smile. "Though I wouldn't mind hearing your version of the story."

"Maybe someday," I say, "when I'm not feeling so puny."

11

When Anne moved out of my apartment, Carla gave me a baby Savannah monitor lizard. She said I wasn't responsible enough to take proper care of a puppy or a kitten, or even a parrot. Lizards require no companionship, only grubs, water and sunlight. "Even you can manage that," Carla assured me.

I named him "Colonel Tom" because he joined the household on January 21, the anniversary of the death of Colonel Tom Parker, the man who made a king of Elvis Aron Presley. Carla provided a terrarium and a starter bag of mealworms, which Colonel Tom the lizard gobbled down in three days. Quickly he advanced to crickets, palmetto bugs and beyond—hunger incarnate, a perpetual eating machine. Before long he outgrew the terrarium, so I moved him to a fifty-gallon dry tank with a bonsai tree, a water dish and a vermiculite beach.

Lizards are not strung with the high emotions of, say, a cocker spaniel. On a good day Colonel Tom's mood ranged from oblivious to indifferent. Only at mealtimes would he respond approvingly to a human presence, blinking a cold eye while cocking his knobbed saurian head. The rest of the time he skulked inside a toy cave that Carla had found for him.

One evening, after a few beers, I took him out to show Juan, who sensibly armed himself with a mop handle. We watched a baseball game on television, and Colonel Tom lay across my lap for five innings without so much as twitching his tail. "He looks parched," Juan observed. "Fluids, Jack, ahora!"

I poured the lukewarm dregs of a Sam Adams into an ashtray and raised it to the monitor's scaly mandibles, and to my wonderment he gingerly extended a tongue as pink and delicate as a Caribbean snail. My lizard, it turned out, had a thing for beer. Inspired, I offered up the remnants of a Key lime pie, which Colonel Tom inhaled savagely. The frothy dollop of meringue clung to his chin like a jaunty white goatee. Juan and I were both drunk enough to be enthralled.

From then on I brought the lizard out on TV nights for beer and dessert. Sometimes Juan would drop by on his way home from work, and a few times he even brought dates to see Colonel Tom in action. The young monitor grew rapidly, soon surpassing three feet in length. The unnatural diet began to soften his prehistoric countenance and bloat his once-chiseled flanks to droopy saddlebags. In retrospect I should have recognized the transformation as plainly unhealthy, though Colonel Tom's disposition had never been rosier. Juan swore the lizard manifested a fan's appreciation of baseball; the fundamentals, if not the finer points. Certainly Colonel Tom was most attentive and bright-eyed when draped across my lap, but I always suspected his spirits were elevated not by the heroics of the Marlins' bullpen so much as the promise of more pastry and distilled hops.

Late one Saturday night, as the Marlins played the Dodgers on the coast, Colonel Tom came down with a brutal case of what I diagnosed as lizard hiccups. Symptoms appeared shortly after he downed a cold Heineken and a slice of rich German strudel that Juan had brought from a renowned bakery in Ybor City.

By my wristwatch I timed Colonel Tom's shuddering burps at eight-second intervals. Discomfort was evident in his lethargic demeanor and blotched, blackening cheeks. Juan had already gone home, so it was left to me to soothe the tremulous reptile. When I tried stroking his corrugated shoulders, Colonel Tom wheeled and snapped percussively. Then, for good measure, he raked a hind claw across my cheek, drawing blood.

"You ungrateful little shit," I muttered, too harshly.

In response the monitor balefully reared his brick-sized noggin and displayed a well-armored maw, featuring rows of fine needle-sharp teeth. A large opalescent bubble of lizard saliva appeared, then popped moistly on the ensuing hiccup. From the TV set rose a hometown cheer as Gary Sheffield hammered a hanging curve into the left-field bleachers, sinking the Marlins in the bottom of the ninth. Colonel Tom promptly fluttered one eyeball and flopped over dead in my lap.

I didn't move for fifteen minutes, frozen partly by shock and partly by the fact that the lizard's glistening jaws had come to rest two centimeters from the crotch of my boxer shorts. A death-spasm chomp of those fangs would have sent me to the emergency room (where, I knew, no innocent explanation would be accepted for a deceased lizard affixed to one's scrotum).

Once it was evident that the colonel had drawn his final breath, I pondered my options. The balcony offered a clear shot at the Dumpster, but that seemed a cold and indecent goodbye. This was, after all, a gift from Anne's daughter. So I resolved to give the lizard a fitting send-off as soon as arrangements could be made. In the meantime I endeavored to preserve his mortal remains, which, given his bulk, wasn't easy. The only way to fit the beast into the shallow freezer compartment of my refrigerator was to pretzel the long limp corpse into the shape of an ampersand.

To this day there he sleeps, Colonel Tom, frostily coiled beneath my ice cube trays and chocolate Dove bars. Every time I think about burying the poor bastard I get depressed.

Out of guilt I lied to Carla and told her the monitor broke out of the tank and escaped. Only Juan knows the truth, and I'm surprised he spilled it to Emma. I suspect she was pumping him for inside information to use against me in the annual employee evaluation. Even though Juan is my best friend, he'll tell Emma whatever she wants to know if he thinks there's a chance she'll sleep with him. At least that's how /always operated in the early stages of a relationship.

Maybe it's better that she knows about the dead lizard in my freezer. Maybe it will upend her set notions about me, and make her wonder what other distasteful secrets I've got.

MacArthur Polk looks like death on a Triscuit. "He can't speak," the nurse informs me.

"Then what am I doing here?" I ask reasonably.

"I meant, he can't speak normally. Because of the tracheostomy."

The old man points gravely to a surgical opening in his throat, to which has been attached a plastic valve that resembles a demitasse cup. A clear polymer tube leads from the valve stem to an oxygen contraption beside the bed.

For the interview MacArthur Polk has been moved from the hospital's intensive care ward to a private room. He aims a bloodless finger at the door, signaling the nurse to scram.

"Keep it short and sweet," she whispers to me. "He's not well." She throws up an elbow in time to deflect a plastic bedpan that would have otherwise beaned her on the forehead. "He can be a pill. You'll see," she says.