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full of wildlife—deer, rabbits, almost three hundred species of wild birds—more than any other place in California. Including flocks of wild swan. Deer come right into our yard. All the men wear genuine Western hats and boots—they work on the nearby ranches.”
    I checked my watch. “Oh, dear, I have to get back to the girls,” I said. “I wish we could go on talking. Can you come over tomorrow? I have some books you’d be interested in. You’ll like the sheep, and our collie dog, Drift.”
    “Oh yes, we’d love to,” said Kleo.
    As I left, Phil insisted on loaning me some books: Franz Kafka’s
The Castle
, Herman Hesse’s
Siddartha
, and James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. On the drive home I thought happily that the new couple had exceeded my expectations. I had stopped feeling miserable and was looking forward to tomorrow.
    The next afternoon I showed Phil and Kleo around my house. Richard and I had furnished it with a combination of antique and modern pieces, Eames chairs, a Noguchi lamp, an antique New England pine table, Navaho rugs—that sort of thing. A clay sculpture I was working on was on the dining room table. The children and I had been eating buffet style in the living room while I worked on it.
    “I’ll bet this place costs a fortune to heat,” Phil said, looking at the forty-five feet of floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the house’s southeast side. He thought that perhaps the welded steel fireplace in the center of the living area might help with the heating expense.
    “It has resistance electrical wire in the floor,” I told him. “We bought this house for $16,000, nothing down, $101 a month, on a 4 1/2 percent GI loan.” We looked at the black-faced sheep in the field and at the large, rounded green hills across the valley. A flock of quail flew up. “There are dozens of meadowlarks around, and last night a fox walked by the corner of the living room.”
    Phil and Kleo browsed in Richard’s collection of modern poetry. “Can I borrow this?” said Phil as he picked up a copy of Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
, which a friend of Richard’s had smuggled into the United States. It was illegal in the United States under the censorship laws of the time. Phil and Kleo stayed for dinner, and afterward we played games with the children. When the children went to bed, we talked and talked.
    Phil said that he and Kleo had been invited by their neighbors, June and Jerry Kresy, to a “flying saucer group that met at ‘Claudia Hambro’s’ house in Inverness.” (Claudia Hambro was Phil’s fictional name for this real woman in
Confessions of a Crap Artist.)
I had already heard about this group. It first met to talk about philosophy, but soon these otherwise sensible people came to believe Claudia’s ideas about flying saucers. Claudia told them that soon the world was going to come to an end, but she was in touch with beings from outer space who were going to save a select number of people, among them, her group. When the last days came, her house would turn into a flying saucer. This would happen early next year on April 22, 1959.
    Claudia told Phil that she perceived that he was from somewhere else. “In some way,” she told him, “you will help the poor lost people from Earth when the last days come.”
    Phil wrote about Claudia in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
:
    [She] was quite small, with a huge black pony tall of such heavy hair that I thought she must be a foreigner. Her face had a dark quality, like an Italian’s, but her nose had the bony prominence of an American Indian’s. She had quite a strong chin and large brown eyes that stared at me so hard and fixedly that I became nervous. After saying hello she said nothing at all but smiled. She had sharp teeth, like a savage’s, and that also made me uneasy. She wore a green shirt, like a man’s, out at the waist, and shorts, and gold sandals…. [I]n some respects [she] seemed