The Unnamed

1

Tuesday morning he returned to work and read over the motion for summary judgment he’d written for the Keibler case. He’d started it the week before, wary at first. Typically you wait for a partner to assign the motion. But five days ago he found himself clearing through a thicket of case documents and juggling a few arguments in his head, just for the fun of it. When he began the outline, a certain heat flashed across the desk, and it jolted the small office with an iridescent energy, a magnetic field inside of which he moved throughout the day. By the time he began to write the introductory paragraph, his mind was alight with radiance.

Outside the window, bees were trying to get in, a dozen or so sideswiping the pane, for reasons you had to be an expert on bees to understand. He thought they should be long dead, or still hibernating in one of their combs, if hibernate was what they did — anything but dipping and hovering in the wintry light so many floors up. Outside the window, the city stretched north before him with its sleek towers and squat, box-top buildings of different sizes and shadows, all bound by the two rivers whose edges were just in view. He had reconciled himself to no longer having a view of the park, just as he had reconciled himself to the smaller office, the scarred desk, and the downgraded chair. The amenities mattered less now. He had not bothered to bring in the canted standing globe or the Tiffany desk lamp or the degrees and certificates that had adorned his previous office. The bareness of this new approach suited his austerity of purpose. He was there to work, and when work was over, to leave the office and resume life.

He stood up to get a better look at the bees. They were really winding back and slamming themselves against the window. He thought they must be knocking their little bee brains out. They hit and rebounded and fluttered up and returned to hit the glass again. Maybe they were in the very process of dying. Or maybe they were just doing what bees did when they got separated from the hive. Did they travel in a hive? Or was that called a swarm? He knew so little about bees.

He returned to his desk. There were problems with the draft, gaps in his argument, a few structural missteps. He spent the next hour patching things up and the following hour doing a cite check. He thought he’d print out the draft and read it at his desk a final time and then file it away in a drawer before doing the work that had actually been assigned to him. He had not been asked to write a motion for summary judgment. By doing so he was disrespecting the protocol and flouting the conditions of his employment. He wrote it as a kind of hobbyist, with the greatest purity of intent. Millions of motions had been written over the course of the law’s centuries, but they had been written with a court in mind, objects of utility and persuasion, while it was possible that until today, not a single one had been composed for the simple satisfaction of the writing itself. He had spent hours working on it over the weekend, happy to have it as a distraction. The house could be a thundering vacuum of quiet when there was no one there to rifle through a kitchen drawer or to lay out the makings of a sandwich on the counter.

He left the office and walked to the printer. He didn’t want the printout sitting in the tray because he had not been authorized and he did not want Peter to think he was ignoring protocol. No one had even discussed the need for a motion for summary judgment in Keibler, at least not with him. But the time would come when submitting a motion for summary judgment would be the right strategic move. Then Kronish and Peter would get together to decide who to assign it to. Probably that kid Masserly. He was Peter’s favorite. Masserly would probably be asked to write the motion.

On his way back to the office Peter called out to him. Masserly was in there, sitting across the desk from Peter, probably not even thirty yet. Just a second-year associate, Masserly, but already with that air of entitlement that some junior associates acquire when they sense they are favored by one or another partner. His skin was dry and pink and flaked at certain termination points like his receding hairline and the curves of his knuckles. When Tim thought of him abstractly, he was reminded of one of those children who age rapidly and prematurely and die as old men at thirteen. Today he was wearing a pink buttondown with white collar and cuffs, silver cuff links winking from the armrests of the wing chair, and a long paisley tie draped down his shirtfront like a silky tongue. Every layman’s idea of the asshole lawyer. Peter offered another iteration in his blue pinstripes and bow tie. He should have worn knotted ties if he was going to let his gut go like that. As it was, with his belly drooping low and prominent, his neck appeared to have hold of a water balloon. A festive spirit animated the air between the two men. Tim held the printout close to his body. There were bees just outside Peter’s window, too.

“Masserly doesn’t know about the walking,” Peter said to him.

Tim stood in the doorway and said nothing.

“No, seriously. I just asked him and he said he’d never heard.”

“I doubt that,” said Tim.

“Tell him, Masserly.”

Masserly turned. “Never heard.”

“It’s sort of a private matter.”

“Private matter? You were profiled in the fucking New England Journal of Medicine, for Christ’s sake. He used to carry a copy of it around with him,” Peter said to Masserly, “to prove to people he wasn’t nuts.”

“That’s not why I carried it around.”

“He’d come in here with a bicycle helmet on his head, wearing a backpack.”

“I’m sure he’s heard this from somebody, Peter.”

“And he’d walk around like a schoolkid heading out for the bus. They were doing some kind of experiment. What was the point of that experiment again?”

“What’s the point of bringing it up?”

Peter shrugged. “We’re just talking. He showed up to court like that once. Judge comes in and he won’t take off the bicycle helmet. He’s got the chin strap all buckled in, wearing a suit. Judge asks him what’s with the helmet. You should have seen Kronish.”

“You can read about it in the New England Journal,” Tim said to Masserly.

“I’ve never seen Kronish so pissed. I was just an associate then. I didn’t say a fucking word, did I, Tim? Did I say a word to you about that bicycle helmet? Not one fucking word.”

“You were a saint.”

“Hey, Tim, don’t be angry. We’re just talking here. Uncontrollable bouts of walking. Masserly, you gotta read the thing to believe it. And then you still won’t believe it.”

Tim wondered who had championed Peter for partnership. Was it Kronish? Personally he had not thought Peter had shown himself to be partnership material. Peter worthy of partnership at Troyer, Barr? He didn’t think so. “I’m going to get back to work,” he said.

“Wait, wait. I mean, it brings up questions. For instance, for instance. What would have happened to you if you had been blindfolded?”

“Hey, Peter. Have you and Kronish talked about a motion for summary judgment yet?”

He preferred to keep a low profile, but suddenly he was unable to hold back. Who had championed that bow-tied twerp to be a Troyer, Barr partner?

Peter cocked his head. “In what case?”

He damn well knew what case.

“Do you guys have any idea who you might assign it to?”

“A motion for summary judgment in what case, Tim?”

“The Keibler case.”

“Keibler?”

“I was just curious if you and Mike had discussed who you might assign it to.”

Peter looked over at Masserly. “Who in their right mind would submit a motion for summary judgment in Keibler?” he asked the kid.

2

He had complained of brain fog. Neither Jane nor Becka understood what brain fog was but neither did they disbelieve he was suffering from it. He had earned the right to say he felt a certain way and to be taken at his word. He said he felt mentally unsticky. The description was unhelpful, but he insisted that he suffered from a lack of mental stickiness. His nerves felt “jangly.” He told Becka to imagine a guitar whose strings had all gone slack. The image was vivid but she had trouble applying jangly to her own nervous system. The physical pain was easier to describe, but this, too, he did in a private way. His muscles felt hyperslogged. His left side was floaty. Some days his breathing was all bunched up. They could only approximate for themselves how those words made him feel when he translated them into metaphor, as with the guitar strings, but he insisted on identifying them in these nonmedical and not very useful ways because to him there was no adequate substitute. They offered the most precise descriptions, the ones that aligned best with his inner experience of being.

“So when you say all bunched up,” Becka had asked him, “you mean to say you can’t catch your breath?”

“No,” he replied. “I mean to say my breath is all bunched up.”

Jangly, hyperslogged, all bunched up — he spoke a language only he understood.

They read to him through the brain fog. He favored history and biography. He was worried that without stimulus he would shed IQ points as if sweating them off into the bedsheets. Not long after his sequestering, Jane had purchased a hospital bed with retractable sides and Velcro restraints at the wrists and ankles, an improvement over the headboard and handcuffs. Together with the bedpan and the bottles of skin ointment and antidepressants and the general stagnant smell of antiseptic and body sweat, the bed transformed the guest room into something out of hospice care. He was in one long nightmare of walking now: walk, sleep, wake up, wait for the next walk. His feet convulsed rhythmically against the restraints. Becka was narrating the Senate exploits of Lyndon B. Johnson when she discovered that he could fall asleep even as his body continued to walk.

“Dad,” she said. She shook him and he came to. “You fell asleep.”

“It’s hard to concentrate through the brain fog.”

“But you never stopped walking,” she said.

She thought that was all the evidence anyone would ever need to prove that what afflicted him was not “all in the head.” His body was not his own if it continued to labor without his conscious input. But he no longer seemed interested in debates. What caused it, mind or body, what it should be labeled, organic disease or mental illness, fell second to his immediate concern.

“You can’t let me fall asleep like that.”

“Why not?”

“Wake me up if I do it again. Keep me up, Becka. Keep reading.”

The next time she came home to relieve her mother, he stopped her before she could even start to read. “This isn’t working,” he said. “Get my things together. Unstrap me.”

“No,” she said.

“This room is death, Becka. Let me out.”

“It will run its course. You have to be patient.”

“It would have done so by now, goddamn it. Let me out of here! It’s death in here!”

How easy it would have been to leave the room and plug his screams with headphones. He was locked away as well as any lunatic on suicide watch. But with her mother gone and she alone to care for him, abandoning him was not an option. Her three or four days with him were always a rigorous and continual effort to keep him focused, somehow keep him connected.

She bought an iPod and filled it with music. “I want you to try something, Dad.”

“Where is your mother?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where does she go when she leaves the house?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“Stop straining your neck. Relax.”

She placed a noise-canceling pair of headphones over his ears, hopeful they would eliminate the rustle of his legs as they struggled against the sheets. Then she introduced him to some of the music that had been her own solace for as long as she could remember.

3

He had sat before the panel trying not to cry. Whatever you do, don’t cry. Just keep talking. His desperation was like a pheromone secreting itself into a room full of wolves. He appealed to them on the basis of over twenty years of impeccable service and the many millions of dollars he’d made the firm. You thankless sons of bitches! he wanted to scream. You ruthless bureaucrats! You’ll all get sick one day, too! This flinty nerve vied in him against total supplication. Oh, please, please take me back! Grant me the full measure of life again. On hand and knee, peering up at formidable and unmoving faces: I will be good, will do as told. No more breakdowns, promise, promise.

“Tim, I think we’ve heard all we need to hear,” said Kronish.

He was jabbering on, making a case for himself, trying not to cry.

“Tim, Tim—”

He stopped talking.

“We’ve heard enough, thank you. I’m sure we’re all very happy that your health has returned. Now give us some time to discuss the matter and we’ll have an answer for you in a couple of days.”

Enough time had passed that his worst transgressions had faded and his earlier reputation had somewhat revived. They agreed he deserved an audience, and he made a decent case for what he had to offer: expertise, years of loyal service, a good legal mind. Still, they voted not to reinstate his partnership in light of his professional misconduct. They invited him to rejoin as a staff attorney, a non-partner-track position.

In accordance with the bylaws he was still receiving his quarterly share of that business he had brought in for the firm during his partnership days. Financially he could have rejected Kronish’s offer for the insult it was. But he was so grateful to be back in the world again and loved Troyer so fiercely that he immediately accepted. He set the phone down and wept. They were such fine people. They had such capacity for forgiveness. It would be fun to be a staff attorney.

4

One of the first things he did after he returned to Troyer was invite Frank Novovian to dinner. He wanted to express his appreciation for the time long ago when Frank walked down the street with him on a cold winter day and gave him his wool cap.

Frank sat on his stool at the security post as still as a pond frog. He looked up from a bank of security monitors as Tim approached.

“Mr. Farnsworth, how are you, sir?”

His tone was flat and affectless and he did not smile — admirable qualities in a man in charge of building security.

“Frank, we’d like to have you over for dinner, you and your wife.”

The invitation caught Frank off guard.

“I’m afraid I don’t know your wife’s name,” said Tim.

“Linda.”

“Jane and I were thinking Saturday, if you and Linda are free this weekend.”

Frank reached around to scratch at a shoulder blade, stretching his suit coat taut. He had added bulk since Tim’s departure. Tim wondered how the blazer didn’t rip down the back. “We’re pretty free, I think, Mr. Farnsworth. What’s the occasion?”

“You can call me Tim, Frank,” he said. “I’m not a partner anymore.”

“If you work for Troyer, Barr, Mr. Farnsworth, I call you by your last name, partner or no partner. It’s a policy not too many others take seriously around here, but that’s them.”

Tim nodded. “All right. But will you call me Tim if you come to my house for dinner?”

Frank thought about it. “If you let me bring the wine,” he said.

“It’s a deal, then. Saturday?”

“Saturday,” said Frank.

Frank took off his Yankees cap the minute he stepped through the door, placing it inside his winter coat in which Tim could picture him clearing his driveway of snow. A vivid image of Frank’s neighborhood came to mind: many houses set close together, metal siding, small backyards separated by chain-link fencing. There was a dog barking and minivans were squeezed into tiny driveways.

In the doorway, Frank lifted his head and looked around the house, as if standing at the start of a guided tour. Out from his post now, he had loosened up and began to praise Tim’s house. He offered Tim a six-pack of bottled beer and introduced his wife. Linda was smaller than Frank, an Asian woman with dark bangs, thick eyeliner, and a wide and pretty smile. Tim had expected a heavily primped Italian with a Bronx accent. Tim took their coats, and Linda offered him a bottle of wine.

“I really mean it, Mr. Farnsworth. This is one hell of a house.”

Tim considered reminding him that they had a deal — he was Tim tonight, not Mr. Farnsworth — but he thought calling attention to that fact might embarrass Frank. He decided to let the matter resolve itself. He moved them inside and Frank thanked him again for having them over.

“This is one hell of a nice room,” said Frank once he had situated himself on the sofa. “And I bet that thing gets great reception.”

“Try it out,” said Tim, handing Frank the TV remote. “My wife’s just in the kitchen.”

“Can I help?” asked Linda.

“Whatever it is,” said Frank, “smells delicious.”

“You can help by telling me what you’d like to drink,” said Tim.

Linda looked at Frank.

Frank looked up at Tim and asked, “What are you having?”

“I thought I’d start with one of your beers,” he said.

“Me, too, then,” said Frank.

“I’ll have a beer,” said Linda.

“Three beers, then,” said Tim, “coming up.”

He walked in and found Jane sitting at the kitchen island. She was peering into her wineglass as if in search of fish.

“Jane?”

She turned to him slowly. She looked at him and then lifted the wineglass. She inadvertently clinked her teeth against the glass, making a ringing sound and causing the liquid inside to break like a golden wave and splash her face. “Mmmm,” she said, setting the glass down and reaching precariously over the kitchen island for a napkin. She sat back heavily on the stool and wiped away the wine.

“Banana?” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“How many glasses of wine have you had?”

She didn’t answer.

“Tonight, too? It had to be tonight, too, Janey?”

“Mmmm,” she said, getting off the stool. “The lamb.” She walked to the oven as if through water. With the oven door open she stood again and turned around, peering across the kitchen. “The hot mitt go?”

“Let me do that,” he said, taking the hot mitt from her hand.

“I got drunk,” she said.

“I noticed,” he said. “When did that happen?”

She reached out for him. She was wobbling and he held her in his arms trying to contain her. “On and off in the bathroom,” she said.

He returned to the living room with beers and Frank announced that he wanted to make a toast. “To your house,” he said. They all clinked frosted mugs and drank to Tim’s house. Then Tim broke the news that Jane wasn’t feeling well and had gone upstairs to lie down. She might be out for the night. Frank and Linda expressed concern.

“We should go then, maybe,” Linda said to Frank.

“No, please,” said Tim. “I’d hate—”

Jane walked into the room. “You must be Hank,” she said.

Tim turned around as Jane came forward to shake Frank’s hand. She tripped on the rug, steadied herself and looked down at her feet. Then she turned and left the room.

All three of them stared with great stillness at the doorway. Tim stood. “She must be feeling better,” he said to his guests. Then he almost collided with her as she came back in. “I forgot my drink,” she said, flicking spilled wine from her hand as she transferred the glass.

“His name is Frank,” he whispered fiercely.

As they ate appetizers, Tim and Frank made small talk about TVs and appetizers in general and then, for some reason, and for a long time, Chex Mix in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Chex Mix. He wanted to share with Frank, a man who could be trusted, the physical and psychic toll of all his recent months in the room.

“Yorba Linda,” he overheard Jane say to Frank’s wife. “Where Richard Nixon was born.”

“Yorba Linda?” said Frank’s wife.

“Because I was thinking, Linda, Linda, because of your name, and then I thought, Yorba Linda.”

Her lamb managed to be edible. By then she wasn’t saying much. She had sunk down into herself far below the frequency of conversation. Tim took charge of the ordeal by summoning his resources as a former Troyer partner and bored his two guests all night with stories of famous cases. They listened politely while sipping their wine. When the monologue was over, they left.

5

He left Peter and Masserly and returned to his office. The motion for summary judgment in the Keibler case was still warm from the printer. He sat down behind his desk and opened the bottom drawer and filed the motion away just as he had planned to do. He tried to recapture the purer impulse that had prompted him to write it and the nourishment the writing itself had offered him during the long and lonely weekend. But now only the sad diminishment of the final product’s destiny meant anything to him. Into the drawer, what a waste. Peter and Masserly together couldn’t formulate half as cogent an argument against the plaintiffs in Keibler if they spent six months knocking their simian brows together, and he’d done it in a weekend. It pissed him off, Masserly’s sense of entitlement and Peter’s unmerited partner status.

He shut the drawer and then rested his arms on the desk and looked through the doorway, burdened and discontented. He tried to think an appropriate thought, something ennobling and proud. Staff attorneys are people, too, he thought. Then he thought, Oh, fuck that.

He took the motion with him down to Mike Kronish’s office. Empty. That was a good thing. He didn’t think he could do it if he had to hand it to Kronish in person. He set the motion on Kronish’s desk and wrote a quick note. He departed with renewed hope and a bad case of butterflies. He was halfway down the hall when he started fretting that he’d done the wrong thing.

6

Twice a day during his time in the room they unstrapped one hand and turned him to prevent bedsores. They did this when he was sleeping. They applied antibiotic ointment to the backs of his legs where the skin had rubbed away.

Becka unstrapped him one night and walked around the bed for the ointment when he grabbed her hard at the wrist with his one free hand. She let out a startled cry.

“Don’t unstrap me again,” he said, his grip tightening.

“You’re hurting me, Dad.”

“If you unstrap half, I will unstrap the rest.”

He let go of her.

“I won’t make it,” he said. “I’ll walk out and I won’t come back.”

They had to find a new way to prevent bedsores. Bagdasarian prescribed a liquid sedative they administered by needle, which toward the end, when he was more or less incoherent, was no longer necessary.

7

Within the hour he was refreshing his inbox every ten seconds in expectation of an email from Kronish. He was watching his phone for it to ring. By half past eleven the wait was killing him and he had to leave. He programmed his office phone to forward all calls to his BlackBerry, and he strode down the hall toward the elevator, wary of being seen.

Frank Novovian stood at his post in the lobby like a raw blister. Coming in or going out, he tried to avoid Frank at whatever cost, but there was little maneuvering with the security man so close to the escalator. He often hid himself in a pack of lawyers but it wasn’t quite lunch hour yet and he was alone. Frank looked up as he approached, and they locked eyes.

“Hey, Frank.”

“Mr. Farnsworth.”

“Getting some lunch,” he said. “Can I pick you up something?”

“My wife packs a lunch for me,” said Frank.

“She does?” He casually walked over to the security post.

“Every day.”

“That’s nice of her. How’s she doing?”

“Loves her new job.”

“She changed jobs, did she?”

“Well, same job, different bank.”

Tim had not recalled, perhaps had never known, that Linda worked at a bank. “Good for her. Wish her luck for me.”

“And how’s your wife doing these days, Mr. Farnsworth? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Tim lowered his voice and peered at Frank across the lobby post.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I sure appreciate your discretion on that subject.”

He nodded to Frank to lend his words some definitive thrust of body language, as if he had actually told the man something about how Jane was doing. Then he drummed his knuckles on the marble counter.

“Now I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.

He checked his BlackBerry going down the escalator and all across the lower lobby. Jane was fine. Jane came home from the treatment center tomorrow. But Tim didn’t know what business that was of Frank Novovian’s.

8

Jane was asleep on the chair next to the bed. He called out to her and she stood up and turned on the lamp. His eyes adjusted, and he saw that it wasn’t Jane but Becka. She waddled back to the long-suffering La-Z-Boy and flopped down on it as if she were stuffed with plastic beans, invertebrate and sprawling. The jaunty springs died quickly. Her settling might have indicated a day’s honest labor, the spent effort of a middle-aged waitress come home to her lonely recliner, but she was instead a young student exhausted by the inconvenient hour and the simple upkeep of this arid and stuffy vigil she brokered when her mother was not around.

“Becka,” he said, “where does she go?”

Becka yawned and shook her head. “I don’t know, Dad. If I knew, I would tell you.”

“I don’t ask her,” he said.

She yawned again.

“You’re tired,” he said. “You should go to bed.”

She didn’t move. He watched her closely. It wasn’t morning as the clock determined it but it was morning to him — the one time in the cycle when for an hour or two he was capable of engaging as nearly a full human being again. If she stood and walked out of the room, kissing him good night before she left, he would lie awake in the dark, and his desire to engage would give way to despair. He had to have this one hour.

“Have I ever told you the story of Lev Wittig?” he asked.

She raised her head off the back of the chair and looked at him with heavy eyes.

“Lev Wittig was a partner at Troyer, Barr,” he said. “Tax partner from Connecticut. Family man, went to Yale. Dullest man you will ever meet. And ugly. He had a neck on him. The largest continuous piece of flesh I’ve seen on a human being.”

She rested her head on the recliner’s gold velvet arm. That chair belonged in a different house, in an alternative family history in which festive struggles were ones of car troubles, bill paying, and who controlled the remote. He looked at his daughter over the edge of the hospital bed. Poor girl, middle of the night, she was so tired.

“But this man Lev Wittig was really a genius at tax,” he said. “You don’t find many of those. Some of the most effective structures currently in place that keep the really big corporations from paying federal income tax were devised by Lev Wittig. You do that at Troyer, Barr, and there’s no question you make partner. Do you want to hear this?”

“Sure,” she said.

“You’re not just taking pity on me?”

“Taking pity on you?”

“It’s so late.”

“Go on with your story, Dad.”

“Okay,” he said. “Lev Wittig. He brought in so many clients, made the firm so much money. But you know what some of our partners are like. Just dull, dull, dull. So rich, so dull. And a guy like Lev Wittig, ugly, too. Rich, dull, and ugly. Now, that’s a powder keg. Are you sure you want to listen to this?”

“Why do you keep asking me?”

“I’m saying if you have to go to bed I’ll understand.”

“Dad, I’m up, I’m listening.”

“I bet you could unstrap me,” he said. “For an hour. I’d be fine.”

“No,” she said.

He sank down into silence.

“Dad?”

“I feel like talking,” he said.

“So talk.”

He remained silent another minute. “Lev Wittig. He throws all his energy into becoming the tax king of the world, and after twenty years, he’s at the top of his game. It’s never going to get any better. He’s sitting on more money than he knows what to do with, and he’s a powerhouse at one of the city’s most prestigious firms. Then he starts to feel age creep up on him. He turns fifty — this is what happens when you turn fifty, you feel age creep up on you. And something in Lev sort of breaks, where he says, if I’m going to work this hard and make this much money and be this good at my job, I’m gonna do whatever I goddamn well want to do. And so he sets forth to do what he wants to do.”

“Which is what?”

“Indulge his sexual proclivities. Which is what all of them want, basically. Are you up to hearing your old man tell you the story of someone’s sexual proclivities?”

“Is it going to make me uncomfortable?”

“No,” he said. “It’s too weird.”

She motioned for him to continue.

“Okay, so he wants to indulge himself, so he finds a guy in Chinatown. Who knows how he finds him, but Lev Wittig’s got money, and when you have money, you can always find a guy. This guy specializes in smuggling exotic animals out of China, Africa, wherever, for people in the city who want to own them as pets and can bear the cost. And Lev Wittig can bear the cost.”

Becka lifted off the arm of the chair. “Where’s this going?” she asked. She curled her legs under her so that now she sat as if meditating.

“Now, the other thing you have to know is, Lev’s sick of having sex with his wife. And you can’t really blame him, because Lev Wittig’s wife, let’s just say, is a brutish woman. Mustache, thinning hair. And he doesn’t want to do it anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. He told everybody. I was just an associate when all this was going on, but he told me how sick he was of having sex with his wife and I didn’t even work in tax. At major firm functions, he’d tell entire groups of people. We’d all be in a circle, you know, everybody dressed up, drinks in hand, and he’s telling it like it’s a courtroom anecdote. But he was Lev Wittig. He practically wrote the tax code.”

“Still gross,” she said.

“But the truth of the matter is this,” he said. And he paused, but not for too long. He wanted to build tension but he didn’t want her losing interest. “Under certain circumstances, he can still have sex with her.”

“How do you know this?”

“Under very particular circumstances,” he said, “he can still do it.”

“Which are what?”

He paused again, longer this time. “There has to be a snake in the room,” he said.

“What?”

“He can’t get an erection unless there’s a snake in the room.”

“Are you serious?”

“Swear to God.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It came out at trial.”

“What trial?”

“Just listen. The guy he hooks up with in Chinatown, at first this guy doesn’t even have to go outside the country. He has a three-foot rattlesnake from Arizona delivered to Lev at the firm. It comes in a box. Inside the box is the cage, and inside the cage is the snake. There are feeding instructions. Do you know what certain types of rattlesnake do to your respiratory system?”

She hugged her knees. “Are you kidding about this?”

“So Lev takes the snake home,” he said, “and he tells his wife that if she wants to stay married, if she wants to keep the family together and the house and all that, from now on she’ll be having sex with a snake in the room.” He paused, letting that sink in. He had gained confidence that she wasn’t going to leave the room until he was through. “I’m going to go out on a limb,” he said, “and say that that one comes as a shock to old Mrs. Wittig.”

“You think?”

“But it’s a fantasy he’s had for years and he’s not going to suppress it any longer. This is what he tells her. A snake in the room gets him excited. So he puts the cage up in one of the guest rooms and he tells her that he’s going to let it out, and she can either be in there already or come in after, but either way, they’re going to have sex with the snake on the loose. So she goes up to the guest room and she sees the snake in the cage and she comes back down and opts for the divorce.”

“Which is the only sane thing to do,” she said.

“Thank you for listening to me,” he said.

“Is that it? Is that the end of the story?”

“No.”

“So why are you thanking me?”

“I just felt like thanking you.”

“Dad,” she said, “finish the story.”

“So what does Lev do? Despite the threats and manipulations, he can’t really do much of anything except move out, given what she can now testify to at family court. So he moves to an apartment near Central Park, and that’s when he starts to hire the prostitutes.”

“To go with the snake?”

“He’s got the money,” he said, “and he wants what he wants.”

“Who is this guy?”

“Lev Wittig. Wrote the tax code. Dullest man you’ll ever meet.”

“I’m not meeting him.”

“He tells them a little fib about how everything must be absolutely dark or he can’t, you know, perform, and then they go into the bedroom, and this is exciting for Lev because there’s a snake present.”

She squirmed and shuddered audibly and gathered herself closer, holding her legs tighter.

“And here’s the thing. Each time, it has to be a different snake. That turns out to be part of the kick. The guy from Chinatown brings Lev cobras and vipers and green mambas, I don’t know what all. Not good snakes to have around.”

“Define a good snake,” she said.

He held up an index finger to indicate that her point was well taken. His hand went only so far because his wrist was held tight to the side of the bed. “He gets good at handling them. He’s got equipment, you know, the boots and the gloves, and he has a pair of snake tongs that allow him to get the snake in and out of the cage, and when that’s done, he puts the cage in a box and walks to the park, where he lets it go.”

“Lets it go in Central Park?”

“Rare and extremely venomous snakes.”

“I can never go there again,” she said. “I can never go to Central Park again.”

“And this keeps up until one night, one of the girls goes into the room and walks toward the bed and steps on the snake.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “What happened?”

“The girl died. I don’t imagine she was in very good health to begin with. Now, say what you will about Lev, he does call nine-one-one, and he tells the EMTs exactly what happened, and there’s the snake right there in the cage, and the snake tongs, and the snakebite on the girl’s thigh, so they call the cops and he gets arrested.”

“I can’t believe you knew this man.”

“These are the people I work with,” he said. “I saw him one last time, before he went to prison. It was just before his trial. He was out on bail. He went from office to office explaining why he’d done what he’d done. Not in a contrite sort of way. Sort of mystified, and sort of looking for understanding. Because he was not the only rich, ugly partner at Troyer, Barr known to indulge himself. And I remember I ran into him in the hall and he pulled me aside. I had just made partner. And he wanted to know if I’d heard the story. So I said I had. And he just looked at me with his bug eyes and his big neck and basically said I’d do the same thing one day. Just wait, he said. He basically cursed me with his own fate. Then he said something like, ‘This has been my cross to bear my entire life. I don’t want to fuck unless there’s a snake in the room, and I just love to fuck.’ ”

Becka sat in the chair hugging her legs and shaking her head.

“Can you believe that?”

She continued to shake her head. The story was over. What, he wondered, would they do now?

“Are you tired?” he asked. “Do you want to go to bed?”

She suddenly yawned as if in answer. He had to think of something.

“Do you know Mike Kronish?” he asked.

“The name’s familiar,” she said.

“You’ve met him,” he said. “He’s the managing partner for litigation.”

“What animal does he have to have in the room with him?”

“Listen to this,” he said. “Will you listen to just one more?”

She let her head fall back, but her eyes stayed open.

“So Kronish makes it a policy as managing partner to personally interview every candidate for hire, which is a pretty arduous task when you consider how many people we look at in any given year. But this is a legendary control freak, even worse than me if you can believe it. And he tells every candidate a little autobiographical story, which I can confirm is true because I was on the plane with him right after it happened. He tells it so that the incoming class of associates understands his personal idea of an exemplary Troyer, Barr attorney, and the story goes something like this. Kronish worked on a case, a very famous case involving the government’s attempt to break up a big tech company for what it considered antitrust violations, a case that went on for several years. Part of that case took place in California, where one of the tech company’s competitors had brought suit against it. And Kronish, who had just made partner, worked the case, so he had to be in California for trial prep. Now, he said he intended — although I sort of doubt this — he intended to fly back to New York a few weekends every month, you know, to spend time with his wife and kids. He had two boys, they were, like, six and eight at the time, maybe eight and ten. And for about two years, except for holidays, Kronish never made it back home. So the boys would come out to visit, and their mom would take them to Disneyland and the beach, and more frequently than not, they’d return to New York after an entire week’s visit having seen their father literally for a dinner or two at the hotel restaurant. So when the case is over — we won, by the way — to make things up to the boys he says to them, okay, you and I are going to spend an entire week at the house in the Hamptons, just you and your mom and me, and we’re going to catch up on lost time. So one Friday they drive out to the Hamptons, and that very night, that Friday night, Kronish gets a call from an important client. And this client says to him that while Kronish has been in California saving the tech client’s ass, another partner at Troyer has been fucking up his own impending trial, and with only two months to prepare, the client’s considering defecting to another firm unless Kronish, and yours truly, step in personally. So Kronish, in the Hamptons with his boys less than twelve hours, calls his driver to turn around and pick him up. He tells the boys that he has to fly to Houston that night and won’t be able to spend the week with them after all. And the boys’ hearts — now this according to Mike himself — the boys’ hearts break. Tears, tantrums, everything Kronish detests about children. So he hands them off to his wife and goes upstairs to pack his things and then comes back down and waits for the car outside the house. The driver comes. Kronish gets inside. And then one of the boys breaks free of the house and runs toward the car. Not a tear on this boy’s face. He promises never to cry ever again if Kronish will just stay. He promises no more crying, and Kronish can see his little face quiver, but he doesn’t say a word to the boy, he just rolls up the window and tells the driver to drive. And the kid just bursts into tears behind the tinted glass while Kronish heads off to Houston. And he tells me on the plane later that night that if the kid hadn’t cried as the driver started off, he would have considered staying. It was like a test, he tells me. Personally I doubt that. But that’s the story he tells me on the plane, and it’s the same story he tells every member of the firm’s incoming class, and he tells it to crowds of people at firm events and to clients so that everyone knows what he considers to be his idea of client commitment. And what is the first thing you see when you walk into the man’s office? You see an eight-by-ten glossy of him and his family on the wall next to his law degree. They’re grown now, those boys. They call Mike ‘Uncle Daddy.’ Now, I dropped the ball with you sometimes,” he said to her, “but I was never as bad as that.”

“You never dropped the ball with me, Dad,” she said.

“In high school,” he said. “I let you down.”

“I was an asshole in high school.”

“I was an asshole from nineteen seventy-nine onward,” he said.

“I’ve been an asshole my whole life.”

They laughed. Then the unsettling silence set in again, and he had to try to think of another story.

9

His return to the firm, his steadiness behind the desk, his palpable sense of day following uninterrupted day gave him faith that it would hold. His time in the room was over. Twenty-seven months and six days of profitless labor had passed. He had endured as a half-wit, the scale of life diminished to a light fixture. Elation followed by delicate readjustment. He remembered the first time stepping out onto the lawn, etiolated, held upright on trembling legs, blinking in the awesome sun.

He walked the halls more often after his return. There was always someone to say hello to in the halls, and he liked to stop with a cup of coffee to look out at the views he had seldom noticed before. He watched taxis taking their slow, toylike turns around corners, and tugboats drifting down the great river.

From time to time he’d want out of the office as out of a catacomb, just so he could breathe fresh air and feel the sunlight on his face. How long would this reprieve last? He lived in constant fear of a recurrence, as if he were an immigrant living in the country of his dreams whose fickle authorities could nevertheless decide without warning to take him into custody, nullify his freedom and dispatch him to sorrow and dust.

On one such outing, he encountered an eclectic group of people stretching around the corner of a gray concrete building, as ornate and generic as a reconstituted bank. They were assembled single file and waiting to enter for a mysterious purpose that made passersby look twice, wondering what they might be missing. He’d seen such lines before but had never cared. Now he slid between two car bumpers, crossed the street and approached the last man in line, and, like a tourist new to the phenomenon of anonymous city gatherings, asked him what was what.

“Casting call.”

“For what?”

“Movie.”

Move on if you don’t know, the man’s curt reply seemed to say. We don’t need the extra competition.

But he stayed put just for the thrill of it, doubtful he’d last so long as to actually enter the building and find himself in front of a casting agent, but feeling nothing else pressing. Or trying his best not to, anyway. There was some busywork waiting for him back at the office, but nothing exciting. Soon a small gathering had accumulated behind him. He felt the interloper. Never took an acting class in his life. Never sat for a headshot or waited tables for crap pay or suffered the heartbreak of losing a part on the final audition. So this was the subculture, so often talked about but so often scattered, invisible as bedbugs, of the struggling actor. With the rest of the artists, together with the immigrants, they carried the city on their backs. Eating like hell and suffering miserable colds, serving your ahi tuna, reciting Shakespeare in the shower. Directly behind him stood two girls: one Latina with hoop earrings and curls stiff and frozen and black as tar, and the other dressed, improbably — although nothing was improbable here, if you just looked around — as a princess, a jean jacket thrown over a strapless white gown of silk and organdy that flared widely at the skirt, a silver spangled tiara in her hair. Must be auditioning for princesses, he thought.

The Latina said to the princess, “Why he think he can do me like that? I been good to him, girl! And then he treat me like some ho, like I don’t even go to church and shit.”

“Have Manny whoop his ass,” said the princess.

“What I’m gonna say to Manny gonna make him whoop his boy’s ass like that?”

“That he been saying shit.”

First the acting subculture, then the subculture of women who did not get the respect they deserved from men whose asses should be whooped by Manny. He strained to recall a single exchange — on the street, from the next table over at a restaurant — overheard in all the years he had lived in the city, within the inescapable nexus of babble he had sat in most of his life, and not one came to mind. Not one. Had he never unplugged his ears of the self-involvement that consumed him about work, when he wasn’t sick, or about sickness, when he couldn’t work? Had he never listened?

Later that day he overheard another conversation after ordering food from the Kebab King. The Kebab King was a white portable plastic hut parked down one of the numbered streets in the Forties. Laminated articles stuck to the side of the cart proclaimed the Kebab King the leader of street-vendor cuisine. The menu consisted of three items — lamb, chicken and falafel — spelled out on the front of the hut. He asked for a lamb kebab and gave his money to a small woman wearing a white double-breasted chef’s jacket and a pair of latex gloves. The Kebab Queen, maybe. The Kebab King was in a similar jacket and had his back to her as he tended to diced meat on the sizzling grill.

Tim waited for his order with great anticipation. He was much hungrier than he thought, and this was something he had wanted a long time. There were entire walks whose source of bitterness was not the pain, nor the mystery, nor the ruination, but the simple fact of passing a vendor’s cart as it issued the agonizing aroma of unattainable meat. Walking hungry with no way of stopping played tricks on the mind, as those who die in deserts know when they mistake sand for water. He had fixed for hours on images of charred shanks turning on a spit over a flickering fire and of tearing hocks of roasted meat directly from the bone, blisters of blood sizzling on the surface of the skin. There was nothing civilized about him then. Just the instinct, primordial and naked, for food and fire.

The woman handed him the tightly foiled sandwich with a ration of napkins, and he realized he had no patience for taking it back to the office. He stood against a brick wall and, out of the way of foot traffic, tore away the foil at one end. The sandwich was hot as ore in his hand. His first bite of meat and juice and yogurt sauce and onions and diced pickles nearly made the deprivation of such a thing worth it. The sandy pita was a full-bodied pleasure. He took large bites that forced him to chew dramatically. He was eating the steam itself.

He ordered a second kebab and walked over to the courtyard on the avenue side of the street. There he sat on a smooth roseate ledge that sloped gently toward the sidewalk and watched the other lunchgoers who sat eating around a decommissioned fountain among the tall buildings. As he ate he overheard two men talking. He had passed them on his way to sitting down. They were just on the other side of the ledge from him, reclining against the wall. They were homeless, or lived in a shelter or in the tunnels, and they each had a bottle in a bag within arm’s reach. One of them owned a wheelbarrow, which had been pushed sideways against the wall, out of the way. It was rounded over with clothes and plastic bags, partially bungeed with a blue tarp. Tim stopped chewing to listen. They were speaking English, but he could not understand what they were saying. He got only the tone of complaint. He understood that the speaker had been wronged in some way, and that the injustice was more than just a minor slight. But as for the words themselves…

“They corset cheese to blanket trinket for the whole nine. Bungle commons lack the motherfucker to razz Mahoney. Talk, knickers! Almost osmosis for the whole nine. Make snow, eye gone ain’t four daze Don.”

“Uh-huh,” said the second man.

“And sheer traps ton elevate the chord dim. Eyes roaring make a leap sight socket.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sheeeeee-it,” said the first man.

Then they fell into silence.

10

On the day he set the motion on Mike Kronish’s desk, he found himself in Bryant Park at lunchtime. He walked up to a kiosk where he purchased a turkey wrap and then made his way toward one of the green tables laid out in the shade. Under his feet, he sensed the final crunch of fallen leaves. He was mistaken — it was the opposite season for turning leaves — but he was too preoccupied to notice. He had but one thing on his mind: had Kronish seen the motion, and if so, what did he think?

He sat down, brushing off the table a languid-moving bee, and unsealed the sandwich from its plastic-wrap cocoon. He kept his eye on the BlackBerry. The day had acquired an edge of cold, but there were still plenty of people about, as if defiance could force spring to act appropriately. He paid no attention to their conversations. From the first bite of his sandwich to the last, he ate mechanically and without pleasure. The ache in his jaw told him he had finished. The duty of lunch had been acquitted. Shortly after, as if his stare at the mute BlackBerry all at once exerted an actual force in the world, Mike Kronish called. He recognized the number lit up on-screen and his heart began to flutter. His heart had done the same nearly twenty-five years earlier when, as a junior associate, a call from a senior partner, no matter how insignificant, was a mortal quest to prove one’s competence. He answered reluctantly in a voice he did not recognize. “Hello?”

“What’s this you put on my desk, Tim?”

“Who is this? Mike?”

“This motion for summary judgment. You write this motion?”

“Did you see that? I left that on your desk.”

“Who wrote it?”

“I did.”

“What for?”

“Oh, because, did you read it?”

“What would I do that for?”

“What for?”

“Who in their right mind would submit a motion for summary judgment in Keibler?”

“Because the strategy.”

“What strategy?”

“I’ve been following the case, Mike. I know it back and front. We both know sooner or later.”

“What do we both know?”

“Sooner or later, you’d want a motion for summary judgment in Keibler and there’s nobody can write that motion like I can.”

“First of all,” said Kronish. He paused to clear his throat. “One, perhaps you don’t know Keibler like you think you know Keibler. Keibler comes down to credibility disputes, and no judge is going to grant summary judgment when there’s a credibility dispute. Two, if you know Keibler, you know the Ellison deposition, and if you know Ellison then you know no, no motion for summary judgment. Three, Second Circuit last year heard Horvath, which is Keibler if you switch the Swiss concern for an Israeli, and the Second Circuit said no, in such cases, never summary judgment.”

“I forgot about Ellison,” he said.

“And Horvath?”

He had never heard of Horvath. He must have been out of commission when the Second Circuit decided Horvath. “I forgot about Horvath,” he said.

“Just switch the nationalities with Horvath and you get Keibler, and now there’s precedent not to grant summary judgment in such cases. So what strategy are you talking about?”

“I was thinking there were differences between the two.”

“Four, you don’t work on my team, Tim. You do and you don’t, you understand?”

“Mike,” he said.

“You hear what I’m saying, Tim?”

“Am I going to be a staff attorney for the rest of my life if I stay at Troyer, Mike? Or is there some way that I could get my old job back? I’d like to get my old job back, Mike. I’m healthy again. I’ve got credentials, I’ve got experience. I just want to know it’s something possible.”

Kronish’s silence on the other end was a torment.

“You say you know Keibler, is that right?”

“Back and front, Mike.”

“Not if you’re writing a motion for summary judgment you don’t,” he said. “Let’s stick to the game plan, Tim, okay?”

He sat for a long time at the flimsy green table in Bryant Park. He wasn’t disappointed. The more he thought about it, the more he was relieved. He recalled the old bodhisattva he’d seen years ago who had warned him against too much focus on the incoming message. He had given over his entire morning to waiting for word from Mike Kronish about a motion he’d never meant to show anyone, whose purity was now compromised. A morning of utter anxiety, stealing right from under him the pleasures of the day. His anxiety had taken him out of the world when one of the things he was trying not to forget, as the memory of his time in the room faded and his old ambitions and preoccupations reasserted themselves, was how to remain in the world. Giving that motion to Kronish and awaiting word of his benediction by way of the BlackBerry had thrust him into the ether of anticipation, a cyberstate where time passed unattended and the world, so long denied during his recurrence, was discarded for the dubious reward of a phone call or email that couldn’t arrive soon enough and would deliver only grief when it did. He had to have resolve. He couldn’t let himself get bogged down again. Jane was coming home tomorrow. She needed his help. How could he give her the attention she deserved if Kronish had called and made him a partner on the spot? He’d be checking his BlackBerry five hundred times a day. What kind of life was that?

As these thoughts came over him, he started paying attention for the first time that day. The wind had picked up and he suddenly felt his frostbitten nerves start to ring in their sheaths like cold bells. The neutered sun cast shadows and just as quickly took them away. My God, he thought, it was already half past one.

He stood and began to walk, once again crunching his way through dead leaves, but now, his attention restored, he saw his error. They weren’t leaves at all but rather a thin blanket of dead bees. He lifted his feet as if to avoid stepping on them, but they were everywhere. They thinned out only when he reached the street. He looked back in amazement — at the hundreds, the thousands of delicate brown and yellow carapaces. In a city of odd sights, it took the prize.

11

Not long after his return to Troyer and on the heels of inviting Frank to dinner, he visited R.H. in prison. It was the one thing he wanted to do least and the most pressing of all the business that had awaited his recovery. It did not go well.

The prisoner, stripped of suit and tie and looking old beyond his years, did not speak. For the longest time R.H. simply remained silent behind the wire-reinforced glass that separated them. He wore an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves. Tim saw the hair on his arms, prominent swirls of gray hair that had been covered over by bespoke suits for all the years he had known him. This small laying-bare pierced his heart. Another noticeable change had taken hold of the hair on R.H.’s head. The dye had washed out, leaving the hair a dull gray. It wavered thin and airy like a loose clump of field pollen. With a regal reluctance R.H. picked up the phone. He held it to his ear and stared at Tim with a kind of catatonic intent, sitting forward and saying nothing. Tim began to speak. Trying to interpret how his words were being received, he was not encouraged. Was R.H. angry at him past reclamation, or was he simply traumatized by his circumstances beyond the niceties of human interaction? He found he had no choice but to put the question out of mind and persevere, knowing that such perseverance was itself a kind of penance.

He admitted that Jane was not ill and never had been. He had lied about her sickness to cover up his own. He had fallen ill just prior to the trial, and the instinct that came naturally to him as a man too proud for his own good was to cover it up. Cover up all hint of weakness, cover it up or he was finished. Essentially, though it was not the first time he had struggled with this particular illness, he was scared out of his wits: scared of failing R.H. at a dire moment, yes, but most of all, scared of losing control over his professional life. Scared for himself first, R.H. second. It was important for him to admit that now.

“I had an option,” he said, as R.H. bore two clean holes through the glass with his silent and inscrutable stare, holes that at any moment might begin to smoke. “I could have recused myself from the start and thrown all my efforts into helping Mike Kronish take over the case. Would that have gotten you an acquittal? I don’t know. Could I have gotten you an acquittal if I had stayed healthy? There was a time when I thought I knew the answer to that. But the truth is, I don’t know. I have learned to have less conviction.”

He believed that R.H. was innocent of killing his wife, but the man on the other side of the glass, almost waxlike in his stillness, staring at him with cold, flinty eyes, that man seemed capable of killing.

“You had him,” he said.

“What?”

R.H.’s head did not move. “You had him.”

“Had who?”

“The man who killed Evelyn,” he said. “You had him.”

“Are you talking about the man with the knife?”

“You had him.”

“Do we really know,” he said, “can we say with absolute certainty that that man is the one who killed her?”

“You had him and you let him go. He was right there in front of you and you let him go.”

“At the time, R.H., I didn’t know—”

“The one guy who could have exonerated me,” he said. “You let him walk away.”

“I think maybe you’re putting too much faith in—”

“You should have grabbed him,” he interrupted with a rising voice. “Why didn’t you grab the son of a bitch? He’s the only one who knows who did it. He did it! And you let him slip through your goddamn fingers! Why couldn’t you grab him?”

R.H. didn’t seem to give a damn for his confession of lies and failures. He blamed Tim for one thing and one thing only. Now it was like an obsession that he had been waiting years to unleash. Tim could hear him just as well through the glass as through the phone.

“Answer me!”

“I think you might be overplaying that man’s role. No one knows for certain that he killed her.”

“He had the murder weapon.”

“It may have been the murder weapon.”

“May have been? May have been?”

His loud voice attracted the attention of the guard standing against the wall. “How could you let him go? How could you walk away? He was my one hope! And you let him go!” He stood up. He screamed into the phone, “You let him go!” He began to beat the glass with the phone. “You let him go!” The guard rushed over. Thump! “You let him go!” Thump thump! The guard grabbed him from behind and lifted him into the air. The chair went flying as the old man kicked out his legs. One of the kicks landed on the glass. He hung on to the phone as long as he could, until the cord snapped and he and the guard went sailing. “You had him!” he cried through the partition. He threw the phone at the glass as the guard dragged him out of the room. His cries grew more muffled. “You had him! You had him! You had him! You had him!”

12

When did she go from someone who liked a glass of wine with dinner to the woman with the lights blazing at four a.m.? Trying to do the bills totally blasted. Her nice quiet life had been stalked from behind by alcohol. Who would have guessed? If you were predisposed, or had the gene, or lacked some inner resource, you had to be vigilant or you went down. Four in the morning and she was digging through her purse for a Newport. What was that? She was not that woman. But she was. Oldest story there is, total cliché. Except when it’s your life. When it’s your life it’s not a cliché, it’s real life, real everyday life, just drunk. It came up from behind her and knocked her to her knees. She never expected it, but that’s what happened, it came up from behind. Being a drunk was simple. It was an accident you caught sight of in the rearview mirror, and the car you saw was your own. The intersection where the accident happened, it was the very one you were approaching. When you turned from the mirror to the road in front of you — BAM! you got hit again. And then, once again, you were looking back at it. She was supposed to be on guard her whole life against alcohol? Who knew.

But it wasn’t an accident. She was making choices, even if she didn’t know it.

She called Becka during his time in the room and said, “You have to come home now and watch your father. It’s your turn, it’s time.” Like he was a baby and not her husband. Like Becka had made the vows and not her. Becka didn’t understand. “Why, do you have plans?” She had no plans. She hadn’t had plans for months. She hadn’t seen a movie, she hadn’t talked to friends, she hadn’t been to the dentist. She wasn’t going outside to collect the mail. Becka got the mail when she came home. Becka was the one who had to drag her by the hair to see Dr. Bagdasarian. Jane kept thinking, when did she become the parent? Becka told her to put the wine down and get in the car. She had called from school to make the appointment. The doctor took one look at Jane and said she was in the dictionary under depressed and wrote her a prescription. She didn’t need a prescription, she needed a life. She needed to start over again with new teeth and fresh underwear. But of course she took the prescription. If it came from a pharmacy and modified behavior, there had to be some merit to it.

But a month went by and she was still calling Becka. “You have to come home. I have to drive.” And Becka said, “Drive?” “Yes, drive.” “Drive where?” Drive where — what sort of question was that? When you’re driving just to drive you don’t know where. You’re just driving. She shrieked that into the phone. If she shrieked, if she called late at night, if she cried, if she made several calls in the same hour, Becka came home and she was able to drive. In the magazines and the newspapers, those people, they had such inner resources. Meeting adversity head-on and all that.

Her first time driving, she made it to Stamford, Connecticut. That wasn’t even an hour away. She thought she’d stop at the Bennigan’s for lunch and then she’d keep driving north. She walked in around lunchtime and the tables in the dining room were full so she took a seat at the bar. She was just going to fuel up before hitting the road again. But she got drunk instead. She was at the bar throughout the day. The daytime bartender switched with the nighttime bartender and she was still there. She finally asked the nighttime bartender to call her a cab. She was drunk and tired and didn’t want to have to walk out to the parking lot. She thought there might be some way to convince someone to carry her. But when the cabbie showed up and the bartender said, “Your cab’s here,” she got off the barstool and grabbed her purse and walked out on her own. She got inside the cab and didn’t know what to say. “How about a hotel?” she finally said. The cabbie drove her to a Holiday Inn and helped her inside. He helped her check in and then he helped her to her room. She woke up around noon not knowing where she was. She woke up, she knew it was a hotel room, but she didn’t know in what city. She walked down to the Denny’s for some coffee and when the coffee started to take effect she remembered the Bennigan’s. She went back to the Holiday Inn and asked for a cab. It was the same cabbie from the night before. She didn’t remember him. He said to her, “Back to the Bennigan’s?” She asked if he ever took a break from driving and he told her that he was doing twenty hours a day so he could pay to pull a tooth.

He drove her back to the Bennigan’s. They drove through the lot but she couldn’t find her car. The cabbie called a friend of his at the municipality and sure enough her car had been towed. Cars weren’t allowed to stay overnight in that lot. The cabbie offered to help, but she thanked him and paid him and went inside to think. It was lunchtime. She ordered a drink and then she ordered a second one. The daytime bartender gave way to the nighttime bartender, and she was drunk a second day at the Bennigan’s in Stamford. She was there another five or six hours until Todd called her a cab. Todd was the nighttime bartender. When the cab came, it was the same driver. She couldn’t believe it. She drank through his night. He was getting at most three hours of sleep a day, trying to earn enough to pull his tooth. But was he fleeing his responsibilities? Was he getting drunk in her neighborhood Bennigan’s? People have such inner resources. He said, “Back to the Holiday Inn?” She went back to the Holiday Inn. Same woman at the check-in counter, same room from the night before. The next morning it was the same cabbie. “Back to the Bennigan’s?”

She asked him to help her get her car out of hock. Then she drove home. It was Monday, and Becka had already missed her first class of the week. That was the first drive she took.

She needed a place like Stamford if she was going to run away from her self-respect. Stamford was the perfect place to feel shameful. She didn’t want too much luxury around to remind her that she could afford not to be unhappy. She liked sitting at the Bennigan’s. She was attracted to it because it was just another chain in another strip mall. If it had been a real bar, the people would have been too real. It would have been the same bartender every time, the same regulars, a home away from home. But after two or three months she never saw Todd again. During her time there, there was Renell and Deirdre and Eva. There was Jerry and Ron. They knew her but they didn’t. People came and went. It was all very anonymous, perfect for getting shitfaced. The Holiday Inn was perfect for the same reasons. She got a room first so she could park the car and then she’d call Emmett. Emmett was the cabbie. He’d pick her up and drive her to the Bennigan’s. She drank Tanqueray and cranberry juice. Then she’d call Emmett to drive her back to the Holiday Inn. He worked twenty hours a day because something was nearly always wrong. He had bad teeth and an ulcer. He had high blood pressure. There were things in the future that needed fixing and things in the past that needed paying off. He couldn’t get insurance and he couldn’t pay for what the insurance would never cover. She had his cell number and on the rare occasion he wasn’t driving for the company he picked her up in his Chevy Lumina. He took care of her when she wasn’t able to take care of herself.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked her one night after helping her inside her room at the Holiday Inn.

“My husband.”

“Your husband?”

“My husband’s at home. Suffering.”

“Suffering what?”

“Suffering what?” she said. “Suffering what? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” she roared. “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

“Do you think this is helping him?” he asked when her laughter had finally died.

“It’s helping me,” she replied.

She failed him. She hadn’t fucked anyone, she hadn’t left him for someone new, but that was only because it was easier to drink. That’s all. With something to take a drink from, she could find the strength to care for him most of the time. But how hard was that? He was strapped to a bed. She could walk away whenever she wanted — and she did a lot of walking away. She got used to him screaming. It got so that with enough wine she could ignore him. She did a shitty job tending to his bedsores. She would fall asleep when she read out loud to him. She wasn’t in the room when he needed to talk. She kept more company with the wine. So she never left, big whoop. So she never fucked somebody else, so what?

When she wasn’t at the Bennigan’s, she moved through the house. She went from room to room feeling the massive crushing weight of it. She tried to remember why they had decided that they needed so much space. To raise Becka, of course — but how big did they expect the child to be? And did they not realize how quickly eighteen years would go by? Did they not foresee how alone they would become in that oversized house? When he was sleeping or when she chose to ignore him, she wandered from room to room, counting the beds. They had a total of eight beds, if she included his hospital bed and the pullout sofa and the twin mattress in the basement. How did they ever come to own so many beds? Who were they for? She didn’t know except to say that seven of them must have been for her. There was no one else around. If his parents had been alive or if her parents had been alive, if he had had brothers and sisters or if she had had brothers and sisters, but nobody had anything and everyone was dead. She could sleep in a different bed every night and never repeat beds for an entire week. He needed one specific type of bed and couldn’t sleep anywhere else and she sort of envied that. She loved her room at the Stamford Holiday Inn. It was too big but it had only one bed. She could move the chair and the desk and the hutch and the other chair around the bed and the room got much smaller. She was shitfaced when she was doing the moving and they always charged her for it but it was worth it. There was just one bed and with the rearranged furniture the room was the size she liked.

One night at the Bennigan’s, she counted the people at the bar. There were three couples, her, and the bartender. That made eight total, and her mind just went from there. She stood up on the barstool, on the rungs that supported its legs, and beat the bar with her hand. That got everyone’s attention. She said, “I see there are eight of us here at this bar.” The people she addressed were total strangers. “Eight of us at this bar,” she continued, “and at my home, I have eight beds.” The bartender came over to ask her to lower her voice. She couldn’t remember who exactly, Eva maybe. “Now I would like to invite every one of you over to my house,” she said, “because I have a bed for each and every one of you. I want all of you to spend the night at my house. It’s about twenty… about forty, it’s… an hour or… don’t know how far away it is…” She kept going on and on until the manager came over. He tried to get her to sit down but she wouldn’t sit down. He tried to get her to be quiet but she snapped at him. “I will not be silenced!” The manager exchanged a look with the bartender. “Please excuse us,” he said to the others at the bar. “I will not be silenced, goddamn it!” she cried. “I’m inviting these good people to spend the night at my house!” The next thing she remembered was Emmett picking her up in the women’s room, where she had fallen asleep on the floor. She had rested her cheek on the toilet seat. That was the last time she was allowed back at the Bennigan’s. From then on, she started drinking at the T.G.I. Friday’s.

13

He did not go back to work after his lunch in Bryant Park. He stopped into a men’s store to buy an overcoat and a pair of gloves to warm him as the sun waned. The day was turning steadily colder. The saleswoman cut the tags from the overcoat and he walked out wearing it. He moved along more comfortably. The luxury of being able to stop for a coat and gloves was a freedom he would never take for granted again.

He went inside a corner bar. The front window was covered with thin metal latticework befitting a hermitage or cloister. He eased onto the barstool as if it were a hot bath for sore joints. With the exception of maybe his desire for a lamb kebab, his thirst for a beer had been the greatest agony. When you wanted a drink and couldn’t have one, the city turned into one long block of lounges and Irish pubs, rathskellers, beer gardens, dive bars, taprooms with a pool table in back, flickering sports bars, wine bars, hotel bars dimly lit as water cascaded down one wall, tiki bars, nightclubs and brasseries and every other conceivable watering hole, including the convenience stores where they made your beer portable with a paper sack. All of them had remained just out of reach. The people he had passed in their windows, with their coats off and half-finished pints in hand, how he had despised them.

A day laborer was drinking down the way, smoking a cigarette in violation of city ordinance and talking with the bartender, who leaned in close to him. Eventually she ventured down the bar to ask Tim what he wanted. She leaned in while he looked over the tap. After he’d made up his mind, she lifted off the bar as if it were a final push-up and poured his beer. It was garnet-colored, shot through with its own light. Tiny bubbles made a half-inch head of foam. He put the beer to his lips and drank.

This was more like it. This was being in the world.

When the bartender returned to see if he wanted another, he asked her, “Have you seen all these bees around lately?”

“Bees?”

“Honeybees.”

“I haven’t seen any bees.”

“I saw a bunch of them dead in Bryant Park just now. Do you know if bees are supposed to be around this early in the spring? Or if they hibernate?”

“I know nothing about bees,” she said. “Steve, do you know anything about bees?”

“Bees?” said the man at the end of the bar.

“Like honeybees.”

“I know they make honey,” he called down to them.

She turned back to Tim. “Charmer, isn’t he?”

She drifted back down the bar.

When he and Jane talked about her drinking, they were free of the recriminations that might have taken hold of them over some lesser matter. This only seemed to make it harder to talk about. A strangeness lay coiled in their domestic familiarity. They lay in bed in anticipation of talking but remained silent for long stretches of time, as if the subject under discussion were not the self-evident steps they would have to take to address her willful drunkenness but the unimaginable ways they might resolve his involuntary walking. They stared into the essential mystery of each other, but felt passing between them in those moments of silence the recognition of that more impossible mystery — their togetherness, the agreement each made that they would withstand the wayward directions they had taken and, despite their inviolable separateness, still remain. It had nothing to do with how age and custom had narrowed their circumstances or how sickness had shaped them outside of their control. It was not a backward but a forward glance.

“I don’t want to go,” she had said.

“It will go by fast.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait for you. Visit you.”

“I don’t see why,” she said.

She hated herself for having failed him. Becka had done it better, she said. He would have done it better by an order of magnitude. He interrupted her. If she was going to assign blame, he would have to take his share. He never intended to bring this on them, no, but intention, or the lack of it, could not grant a full pardon. He could not escape blame even if it was the faultless blame of being born and falling ill, blame that was also Jane’s, that was anyone’s, really — everyone’s price to pay for being mortal.

“We’ll take a vacation afterward,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“How often will you visit me?”

“As often as they let me.”

Visiting hours were from six to nine. He often left work early to spend a few hours with her before returning home.

The ring of his BlackBerry brought him back to the bar and the barstool.

From the moment Masserly began to speak, with his clown’s voice that seemed to suggest the arrival of puberty any day now, Tim forgot his resolution to remain in the world and resumed a bitter longing for his old job. He didn’t even mark the transition. The pockmarked bar smooth to the touch, the mahogany details, the bottles arrayed before the distressed mirror like all the king’s men — they faded the moment of the phone call. “Tim, it’s Kyle Masserly.”

“Yeah?”

“This motion for summary judgment in Keibler.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Didn’t you get a call from Kronish?”

“How do you know about my motion, Masserly?”

“They gave it to me.”

“They who?”

“They want me to clean it up. Not that it, you know—”

“Clean what up?”

Tim listened intently. He had his finger drilled into his opposite ear to block out the music from the bar, and for a quick second it sounded as if Masserly had hit the mute button.

“Did you just put me on mute, Masserly?”

The office ambiance came back with the kid’s voice. “Yeah, clean it up. They’re going to submit it tomorrow.”

“To the court?”

“But like I need to do anything to this thing.”

“They’re going to submit that motion to the court?”

“Tomorrow. I just got off the phone with—”

He was standing now between the bar and the stool, trying to concentrate on what Masserly was saying.

“With who?” he said. “Masserly?”

“—and they love it.”

“I wrote that motion,” he said.

“Which is why I’m calling. You should get credit, not me.”

“Kronish told me it was pointless.”

“And where did you get the genius to—”

Tim thought he heard the start of a guffaw just as Masserly’s voice cut out. His end had gone mute again. Or so it seemed. Sometimes lawyers made phone calls with one finger poised over mute so they could bad-mouth the opposition.

“Did you just hit mute again? Is someone in the office with you?”

“Mute? Look, I was asking where you got the insight to write a motion for summary judgment in Keibler when there’s Horvath. It’s genius. But you know Horvath chapter and verse the way you make implicit the differ—”

There might have been another guffaw, but the line went dead.

14

Another thing he had to do after getting his life back was tend to his ailing body. He visited the Russian and Turkish Baths on 10th Street, not far from Tompkins Square Park, where he sat in the steam room. The heat softened his bones. A bucket of cold water poured over his head reawakened dulled nerves. He liked the place, despite the fact that the other men made him feel like an anorexic. They were hunched, hairy, burly-backed men with traces of immigrant pasts who walked naked around the locker room, their taut bellies and bulby pricks too much for the rough handkerchiefs that passed for towels at the registration desk. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t vain. Vanity was a luxury of those exempt from the compromises of a long illness. He felt self-conscious only of his missing toes.

The entrance to the baths resembled any other crumbling red stoop in the city, with a lunette above the double doors that read Tenth St. Baths. A man came out just as he was entering and held the outer door open for him. Tim thanked him and climbed the small flight of stairs and almost went through the black door to the registration desk when he suddenly stopped. He dropped his gym bag and ran quickly back down the stairs.

He spotted the man walking east toward Avenue A. He was just then opening a translucent umbrella screen-printed with a map of the world. The unfurled umbrella swallowed up his head and shoulders.

Tim needed a better look, a clear and unambiguous look, to confirm that it was the same man he’d encountered on the Brooklyn Bridge. He ran down the stoop stairs and crossed to the opposite side of the street. It still felt unnatural to walk hurriedly with missing toes. He pressed down on their phantoms. He reached the corner ahead of the man and lingered there to see in which direction he would turn. The man waited for the traffic to clear and then walked across Avenue A. Tim followed him into Tompkins Square Park.

He kept his distance as they walked along the curving path, past benches and fenced-off trees. As they approached 7th Street, Tim quickened his pace. He walked ten feet ahead of the man and then turned and walked toward him. The man’s head was downcast and buried in the umbrella. Tim realized he wasn’t going to get the look he needed unless he said something.

“Excuse me.”

The man peered up. Tim saw the same drawn, lonely face, the same dimpled chin, the same long pointy nose with the knuckle in the middle. The man lowered his head quickly and resumed walking.

They hit 7th Street. They walked alongside each other just as they had on the bridge. “Hey,” said Tim, but the man would not be distracted again. Tim tapped his umbrella, and when that did nothing he grabbed it and held on. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

The man yanked the umbrella away. “What do you want?” he asked.

“I know who you are.”

“Do you want some change, is that the idea? Well, I don’t have any change to give you. You should get a job.”

The man returned the umbrella above his head and resumed walking.

“Hey, don’t walk away from me.”

Tim had to move quickly to remain at the man’s side. He looked around for others on the street with them but there was no one. The city seemed to have cleared out.

“Find someone else to harass,” said the man. “I have no change for you.”

“I know who you are,” said Tim.

“You’re obviously a lunatic.”

Tim reached out to grab hold of the man’s arm. With one graceful move the man slipped his grasp and retreated two paces. In the process he abandoned the umbrella. It spun like a dying top on the sidewalk. When Tim looked at the man, he saw that he was standing oddly erect, his two hands lightly fisted.

“You must stop harassing me,” he cried loud enough for anyone to hear.

“You know something about the murder of Evelyn Hobbs,” said Tim. “The police want to talk to you.”

“Fine,” the man said, again too loudly, “take the umbrella. Just leave me in peace and you can have the umbrella.”

The man walked sideways toward the corner of 7th and A. He raised one hand to hail a cab, but the street was just then empty of all cars except those parked at the curb.

Tim approached him cautiously. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“You are a lunatic!” cried the man.

“You and I need to go to the police.”

Finally a single cab appeared in the distance. The man held up his hand. “Do not come any closer,” he said to Tim.

Tim took another step forward. “I’m not letting you inside that cab.”

The cab aimed its way toward them. He grabbed the man just as he was reaching for the door. He got hold of his upper body and clasped him from behind in a bear hug. The man swiveled with Tim on his back and slammed him against the rear door of the cab, knocking the wind out of him. He had a raw vital power all out of proportion to his pale demeanor. His struggle was a practiced struggle, his resistance a trained one. Pinned against the cab, Tim gasped for air. The cabbie stepped out but then stood there frozen, staring from the open door. Tim told himself he just needed to hold on until someone called the police. The police would take them in, they would identify the man, they would finally have the man in custody. But then he was lifted off his feet and lofted into the air, thrown right over the man’s back, and landed hard on the curb. He lay, stunned, half on the sidewalk, half on the street.

The man hovered over him and grabbed his jaw like an angry mother. He got close and looked him in the eye. “You forget me now,” he whispered, “or I will kill your wife and daughter. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Forget me.”

“Okay.”

Tim stared up at the dense sky for he didn’t know how long. Only his eyes moved, blinking involuntarily when a raindrop landed close by. Someone finally came over.

“Where’d he go?” asked Tim.

“Are you okay?”

“Where’d that man go?”

The stranger looked up. “What man?”

In the days that followed, Tim reengaged Fritz Weyer. Fritz showed the sketch to the guys who ran the baths. No one recognized the face. Tim told Fritz to keep searching. He was confident the man lived in the area. He said nothing about the fact that he and the man seemed to be the only two people in the entire city at the moment of their encounter.

15

The details of the Ellison deposition came back to him, unbidden, while he sat at the bar, and he couldn’t see any reason why it precluded summary judgment in Keibler. The credibility dispute issue was highly debatable. And as for Horvath, whatever that was, there was always a way around precedent.

But was someone in Masserly’s office guffawing at him?

He was on his way back to the office to find out when his cab slowed for a light. He peered over at a garbage truck, where a man in corn-colored gloves was just then stepping off the truck’s ledge. From the street corner the man dragged one of the city’s green mesh bins over to the truck’s hopper and tossed it in, shaking it twice with quick indifference before returning it and resuming his weary perch on the ledge.

As Tim watched him, he thought despite all that man must see of the city on any given day, he probably noticed none of it. He put in his eight hours of garbage and went home. His memories were of stench, stickiness, weighty bins. That was no way to live. If you want to do it right, he thought, you have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl inch by inch across the earth, stopping occasionally to touch your cheek to the ground.

So then what was he doing in a cab?

“Can you let me out here please?” he asked the driver.

He paid and stepped to the curb. He was still far from the office. He stood on the street corner in his new coat and pulled his gloves tight. He watched the people passing by on the opposite side of the street, the cars thundering past, the unyielding permanent motion of the city. He stood absolutely still. The first of a spring snow was beginning to fall. It collected on his shoulders. The wind bum-rushed him from the west, filling his eyes with tears. He squinted and took a close look at a building across the way, the three whipping flags mounted above the revolving door, the green scaffold poles. A cluster of exiled smokers hovered around the entrance. Closer by, pigeons cooed and balked. A stout Hispanic woman in sandwich boards stood on the street corner mutely passing out flyers for discount men’s clothing. Metal burned bitterly from a pretzel vendor’s cart.

Maybe they let him return not because they were generous, but because they were cruel. They knew the greatest way to punish him was not to freeze him out forever, but to put him within reach of real work every day and then to deny him and deny him.

He walked down to the West Village. He sat for a spell on the stoop leading up to a brownstone. The sun had fled from the block and was rapidly disappearing from the city altogether while casual flakes drifted in the air. The exposed brick, the cement stairs, the small ironwork gates, the tin garbage cans, the protective grilles overlaying the windows of the garden apartments — all radiated a falling night’s cold. The cars parked along the curb were naked and cold.

A woman emerged from a brownstone across the street. She was accompanied by a couple. The three of them stood on the stairs a moment before shaking hands and saying good-bye. The woman remained on the stoop and looked in both directions as if expecting someone. He noticed a For Sale sign posted on the brownstone.

He walked across the street and introduced himself. He told the woman he was a partner at Troyer, Barr. Quick to recognize the name of the firm, she immediately invited him in. She was trim, smartly dressed, and full of rehearsed speech. They entered the parlor-floor apartment. He walked to a recess of windows where he admired the view. The woman stood behind him, in front of the fireplace. She broke her monologue occasionally to say, “Let’s see… what else…” He stared through the darkening glass as it began to reflect more of his warm and motionless silhouette than the stuff of the outside world.

“Would you mind turning off that light?” he asked.

The woman walked to the kitchen, her shoes clapping against the hardwood floor. The room fell into darkness, and his reflection in the window faded. Outside, lit windows made a lambent patchwork in the brownstones across the street. The buildings were built of white brick and red brick and the brick of fall colors. Residents walked down the street toward home as softly as the falling snow. He resolved to call Kronish. They weren’t going to let him back in. And what did it matter anyway.

“It’s a wonderful street,” he told the broker.

16

Jane came out into the light and stood abreast the long white columns of the porch while he walked down the stairs and placed her bag in the trunk. The fickle temperature had risen overnight and the day was warm and bright. They left the facility down a dusty lane overhung with trees just coming into leaf.

“Would you like to take a drive?” he asked.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wasn’t sure if you wanted to go home right away or if you’d like to be out in the world. You haven’t really been out in the world.”

She didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t want to go home. She wasn’t sure she was ready to leave the facility. She lived among flowers and courtesy there, among the firm and guiding voices of the counselors, surrounded by nicely groomed lawns. She was cut off from temptation, unburdened by compromise and guilt, and there she had only one room with one bed, her life stripped down to the simplicity of self-survival.

“A drive’s a good idea,” she said.

“It’s a good day for one.”

“It’s nice to feel the wind coming in. I haven’t been in a car in a long time.”

“Are you happy to be going home?”

She didn’t answer.

“You can be honest.”

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

They avoided the highways. They took the numbered routes that turned into streets with names whenever they entered one of the small towns. They stopped at a state park and walked from the parking lot down a footpath to a flowering lake and stood at the edge a few feet from the still water and listened to the silence.

“Let’s jump in,” he said.

“I don’t have my bathing suit.”

“We’ll go naked.”

“In the middle of the day?”

“Who’s looking?”

She peered around and saw no one, no one on the water itself or on the far shore. They walked up into the woods a few feet and took off their clothes and hung them from a tree and then ran silently into the sun-skinned lake, which was much colder than either of them anticipated when they were taking its temperature with their fingertips.

“Christ, oh Christ,” he said. He reached for her in a panic of cold, and she was eager for him. They fought the water in a firm embrace, turning in circles and chattering and rubbing each other’s bodies with their hands and wondering how much longer they could stand it. “It’s kind of torture.”

“Bracing,” she said.

“Stupid.”

“Your idea,” she said.

“Really stupid. Are you ready?”

“We just got in.”

They raced back to their clothes. He dried her off with his undershirt and stopped to kiss her breasts. Her red nipples had hardened and dimpled from the cold, and with her hand on the back of his head, she pressed his hot mouth tighter. He got down on his knees and pushed her gently against the tree. She spread her legs and dug her backside into the rough bark and gripped his hair between her fingers until she came.

Inside the car again they blasted the heat. “I’ve missed that,” he said.

“You’ve missed it?” she said, touching her flushed face with both her hands. Then she burst into laughter.

They drove along the water, past seaports and tourist spots that had been battered the week before by the season’s first hurricane, which came earlier and hit stronger than anyone could have forecasted. The harbors and beaches had been damaged, and as they drove along they got a glimpse of a stretch of expensive beach homes, one of which had been cleaved on one side by a schooner.

They got on the highway that led home and he drove past the exit. “You just missed the exit, Tim.”

“Are you going to go back to work?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

She didn’t want to go back to work. She supposed it was the best way to spend her time, that it was an honorable distraction from the many hours in a day, and that it gave her life continuity and purpose. But the truth was she didn’t want to do anything. She couldn’t explain why, but she was nearly completely absent of any assertive sense of what she wanted to do with herself. She didn’t mind that they had missed the exit. They could keep driving forever.

“I probably will,” she said.

“If you do go back,” he said, “I have a listing for you.”

“A listing?”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Are we driving into the city?”

“Be honest with me. Do you really want to go home?”

“It’s probably the last place I want to go,” she said.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I’m supposed to be happy to be going home, aren’t I?”

“Not if home makes you unhappy.”

When they reached the city he parked in front of a fire hydrant and threw on the hazards. He didn’t step out immediately. She was taking her cues from him, so she waited, watching him. He turned and announced he’d quit the firm. He had presented his resignation to Mike Kronish the day before, only to learn that staff attorneys didn’t need to formally resign. They just needed to give personnel their two weeks’ notice. Hearing the news, she felt something for the first time.

“They were never going to let me back in,” he said.

“You thought they would?”

“Didn’t you know that’s what I was hoping for?”

“I didn’t understand how you could do it if you weren’t a partner,” she said.

“Well, I couldn’t.” He opened the door. “Come on.”

They stepped out. He had a key to the front door of a brownstone she had never seen before, and he had the key to the parlor floor, and when he opened the door to the empty apartment he said, “We don’t own it just yet.”

She hung in the doorway. He stepped inside and leaned his back against the wall to look at her.

“What’s all this about?”

He motioned for her to follow. They walked through the apartment. It was a tenth the size of their house in the suburbs. It had charm and character and windows full of sunlight, hardwood floors and a remodeled kitchen, and a restorer’s touch around the woodwork. It had an antique chandelier and claw-foot tub. He led her to the far room.

“This is the bedroom,” he said. “It’s the only one.”

She walked around the empty room. “What would we do with all our stuff?”

“What do we need stuff for?”

“And what happens when Becka comes home?”

“We give her the sofa.”

“What if she wants to move back in after college?”

He looked at her. “We’re talking about Becka here,” he said. “Have you met Becka?”

“Good point.”

“Here’s the point.”

“What?”

“Only one bedroom,” he said. “Only one bed.”