Bill

Bill is the person who mugs Leo, forcing him to drive to a Safeway and withdraw money from an automatic teller machine. Suffering from a gunshot wound, Bill makes Leo swear that he will telephone Bill's girlfriend to tell her Bill is all right. This mugger and his girlfriend play a role in Lucy's imagination, as Lucy wonders "what it was about her that made her stay with a man who ran from the law for a living." Lucy never meets Bill, but hears about him often, as Leo likes to recount the story of his mugging.

Gordon

Gordon is Lucy's former boyfriend. The son of "poor people, strawberry pickers in the Central Valley," Gordon, whose real name is Salvador, is a childhood prodigy, receiving a doctorate in literature from the University of California at Berkeley before he turned twenty and a tenure-track teaching job there before he...