Status Updates From Le Chien Couchant

This little world, which seemed bewitched by Maria, gazed at her as she drank away blindly. She might easily have drunk herself into a stupor, thus ending the evening without disaster, had not the malicious tart—the sorehead, the little drunken one who had unleashed the unpleasantness
the first time—arrived around midnight.

He could remember now, as in an impossible dream, the few moments
when she had laughed, talked about orchids, the sun, her big toe to be massaged by dummies; the moments during which he had seen in her a vibrant youth, charm, and astonishing beauty.