And, really, the proof of the untruth is the nature of Ronnie himself: he was hardly someone who would stand by, uncomplainingly, while someone purloined one of his songs and not even mention it until years afterwards. He would have fronted it up with me there and then.

He's got lots of sales pitches in his quiver.

Yet her obsession with remaining inscrutable has the curious effect of making her also unable to read others—for example, she misses entirely the subversive humor of the black garage mechanic, Jimmy, with whom she deals every day, uncertain whether he is shy or dimwitted (19). Similarly, she misreads her one black colleague, Pompey, whom she wrongly believes has sabotaged the elevator she is accused of having misinspected.

His knife dripped with the white, just red-flecked life-blood of the stark-eyed beauty—the mullet must have turned four pounds—he’d slit open with a quick slice of his accustomed fingers—coarse, work-rough fingers, horned as well as torn by sixty years of endless labor, blunted, unshapened by coarse, relentless toil of coarse, relentless existence never shirked, never deplored; skillful, certain fingers—for in such butchery as this of his the hand of constant usage hath, as it happens, the surer sense.