WAS SITTING IN DUDLEY’S CHAIR, looking into the fire, waiting for a visit from Patti.  The night was warm enough not to require a fire; it might even have been warm enough to make a fire ridiculous; but I required a fire for atmosphere.  I was Dudlifying myself, putting myself through a course of Beakerization to prepare myself for Patti’s visit and the resumption of our experimental investigation into the matter of my paternity.  The transformation seemed to require my sitting in Dudley’s chair before the fireplace, and it seemed to require a fire in the fireplace.  The fire hadn’t lit right away, so I’d torn pages from the magazines in the rack beside Dudley’s chair to keep it going.  A haze of smoke still filled the room, even though I’d opened the windows.  I had begun reading a story in one of the magazines, but when I followed the “continued” line, I found that the page on which the story concluded had been one of those I’d burned to get the fire going.  I was sucking on one of Dudley’s pipes and trying to decide whether the struggling young painter in the story would manage to persuade the pretty young waitress—actually a struggling young actress—to pose for him, and, if so, how he would manage to do it, when the phone rang.
    “Hello?” I said.
    “Dudley?” asked a sweet voice at the other end of the line.
    “No,” I said without thinking, “this is—”
    “Dudley, it’s Ella.”
    “Huh?   Oh.  ‘Ella.’ Um, good evening, ‘Ella.’  How are you?”
    “I’m fine, Dud.  I was wondering if I could come over and visit you for a while.”
    “More homework, I suppose?”
    “Homework?  Oh, yeah, that’s it.  More homework.”
    “Of course.  I’d be glad to help you.  Come right over, my dear.”
    “I have to change my clothes first.”
    “Oh.”
    “I won’t be long.  I’m just going to go up to my room and change my clothes.”
    “Okay.”
    “Just going to run up to my room—” A giggle.  “—and change my clothes.”
    “Oh.  Your room.  I see.”
    “I’ll bet.  Here I go—up to my room.  See you later.”
    I went upstairs to Dudley’s study.  With the light out, I looked across the way at the window of the room in my grandparents’ house that had been my mother’s bedroom.  Had I understood Patti correctly?  Was I, as Dudley, actually going to see the light go on in the room and then see Patti, playing the part of my mother, begin undressing, like the shy girl in the young painter’s unheated studio, assuming that he had found the words to persuade her to accompany him there and then had found the words to persuade her to begin unbuttoning her blouse?  I stood in the dark wondering what those words would be, when the light did indeed go on in the room across the way, and there was Patti in the doorway with my grandmother by her side, the two of them performing a pantomime, Patti in the role of a distraught young girl bespattered by a passing car, and my grandmother playing a kindly grandmother more than willing to help her.  Patti pouted, plucked at her skirt, wrinkled her brow, slumped in exasperation, gesticulated to indicate the madcap driver careering along oblivious to the puddles and to her, and reinacted her leap backward, too late, alas, to avoid the wave of muddy water, and then—with a smile and a shake of her head at the way good luck sometimes comes right along with bad—produced a change of clothes from a paper bag that she was holding; my grandmother pouted in sympathy, patted and petted Patti to comfort and calm her, smiled at the change of clothes, indicated the dressing table, then turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.
    Without once looking my way, Patti began unbuttoning her blouse.

WHEN THE DEAR GIRL arrived at the front door a few minutes later, I was in quite a state.  All the ardor of a young man in love had set my heart to pounding and sent my blood pulsing through my veins, while the wisdom, propriety, and caution of a middle-aged—oh, let us not say that, not “middle-aged”—let us say rather that the wisdom of a man no longer quite so young nor nearly so foolish as he once had been counseled me to calm myself, to still my throbbing heart, cool my ardor, calm my passions: to behave myself.
    I opened the door with a trembling hand.
    “Hi, Dud,” said the innocent darling.
    What would she have said, I wondered, if she had known that a thousand heartbeats earlier I had watched with hungry eyes while her schoolgirl’s garb fell from her body, the white blouse slipping from her shoulders, the plaid skirt dropping down her creamy thighs, until all, all was revealed, all her charms, more than I could allow myself to recall while she was standing there, so sweet, so pure.
    “Come in,” I said, trying not to sound like a spider welcoming a fly.