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encouragingly.
    â€œAnd it means they have pets,” says Pat. “That Hugh is not an animal-hater like Hart.”
    â€œIt means the kids talked him into a hamster. Why don’t they have a normal pet, like a dog or a cat?”
    Pat and Oliver are silent. Emily brings her attention gradually back from the view—the birds, the slate-colored river, the blue sky soft with clouds, and gray Manhattan with the two tall blanks in it that no one will never get used to—and focuses on Oliver and Pat. She smiles. “I’m sorry,” she says. “He sounds nice. I actually think hamsters are sweet. I’m sure I’d like him.”
    Pat seizes on this. “Should we invite you both for dinner? Or would you rather go out? What would make you feel least uncomfortable? What would be the most fun?”
    Marcus , Emily thinks. He will be at the party tonight. Will he wear his beautiful hemp shirt?
    â€œHey! We could all play poker,” Pat goes on. “You could teach us.”
    Emily smiles, shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I really am.” She stretches out her foot to rub Gus’s tummy, and he wraps his paws around her moccasin and bites it. “I don’t mean to be difficult or ungrateful, but I don’t want to meet him.”
    â€œYou said you thought you’d like him!”
    â€œI probably would like him if I met him.”
    â€œSo?”
    She can’t bear Pat’s earnest, affectionate, puzzled, getting-irritated face. Gus drops her foot and lies back, sated and fat, purring. Emily leans her cheek against the cold glass, looking out the window at the sky and its scrapers. From seven flights down, a car alarm starts up. The pigeons swoop by again.
    â€œI just don’t want to. Thanks.”

4
    Flee to me, remote elf!
    â€œDid you do the puzzle?”
    â€œIt was too easy.”
    â€œI had a small upper-right-hand-corner problem.”
    â€œEleazar?”
    â€œWhat a silly name.”
    â€œRidiculous. What were his parents thinking?”
    They are eating cake and drinking brandy at Luther and Lamont’s place on Grand Street. It’s the loft Emily lived in when she first came to New York, but it has been, to severely understate the case, fixed up. The party is a success. First a lot of beer, then presents, then more beer. Then Lamont’s famous vegetarian chili and Luther’s hush puppies and somebody’s cole slaw and somebody else’s garlic bread—superfluous but delicious—and then “Happy Birthday to You” and candles and Pat and Oliver’s chocolate cake, which cooled and so has regular frosting, not warm sauce. Lamont believes in serving dessert not with coffee or tea but with brandy: it’s V.S.O.P., but a brand Marcus doesn’t recognize, which is how he knows it’s really good.
    Now the party is winding down. Even Gene Rae and Kurt have left—Gene Rae, famous for partying, has changed since she became pregnant and now goes to bed by midnight. Even the intrepid Tragedy Club staff—Fiona and Zelda and Carey the bartender—are on their way out.
    â€œYou’re not eating that cake,” Emily says. “You’re pushing it around on your plate like a kid does with spinach.”
    â€œI’ll take it home.” Marcus wonders if his appetite will ever return. He sees Emily studying his face, and knows it must have a strange look on it. The look of someone who has brunched with a monster. He says, “You never told me about Fort Salonga. How did it go?”
    â€œIt was a bust. I got a nice TIME from a billboard, but I’d really hoped to find a BREAD or two.”
    â€œNot a good bakery town?”
    â€œNope. And not a single DOG , either.”
    â€œWell, damn. Did you have fun, though?”
    â€œI did have fun,” Emily says, as Marcus knew she would. He watches her slow smile assemble itself: the little puckers in her pouty bottom lip smooth