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feeling, it had to be admitted, was not having things under control. It was in fact no more rational than his daughter’s explanation. It made his beard a liar. But independent of the absurdity of this intuition, hopelessly apparent on voicing it, he understood now its true and ugly little function. It gave him something to hit back.
    “Because I honestly have no fucking idea what you would be capable of if you were afraid of losing me.”
    He glared at her. She removed her sunglasses and met his eye.
    And then the hard and angry thing sheltering him to his hot relief cracked and he covered his face and wept. A booth of half-drunk lawyers pretended not to stare. Olivia gently rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. She replaced her sunglasses with the other and pulled her olive from the toothpick and stripped it of brine with her tongue.
    *   *   *
    They went up to their customary room and had the customary dispassionately antagonistic sex that was the way things were done for years. Afterward Olivia lay on her stomach smoking a cigarette though smoking had not been permitted in their room for some time, but the notion of moving to another was not one they would have given any more serious thought than a bird would flying north for the winter. It was not the way things were done. There ran along Olivia’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale, pinkie-length scar, the remnant of some crude surgery. Dr. Godfrey was up and stuffing his shirt into his trousers. His eyes swept the floor.
    “Where’s my—” He saw her foot waving to and fro and his tie dangling between her toes. He reached for it but her foot darted away. He seized her ankle and took his tie and moved to the window, looping it around his neck. Visible across the river on the Hemlock Grove side was the lancing flame burning waste gas from a chimney of the coke works, now operated by a Luxembourg steel company but once a part of the Godfrey dynasty of polluting vulgarity that like so much else was lives ago.
    He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his socks on. Olivia exhaled smoke and steepled her fingers.
    “I was afraid you meant it,” she said. “Last time.”
    Last time, which had been in the spring, he had said not to expect him to call again. It was news to both of them, his saying it had surprised him maybe even more than her. The way the most obvious thing can be the least thinkable. Atlas shrugged.
    “I see,” she’d said eventually.
    “Because I just don’t have the energy anymore,” he answered in explanation to himself.
    “The energy for what?” she said. It was a rhetorical point, and a correct one. Their arrangement required none. It was a perpetual motion machine by now, older than the tides. He knew married men who would kill for it. Men who would kill for her. It occurred to him he had once been a man so worthy of envy and pity.
    He said nothing. His face was a much-used sponge that had not actually held moisture in years.
    “Please,” she said. The quiet dignity with which she said this word belying how infrequently she used it. “Please … think about it.”
    He lied without charity that he would and in the interim had not. He had instead taken up drink as affective novocaine. If the point of novocaine was the numbing of a numbness. In his last loveless years Jacob Godfrey was known to spend hours on end standing in the front yard of the house he had constructed at the summit of the highest hill in the valley. He would survey the land of his sovereignty, a land he had forged into his own vision through blood and fire, and know at his life’s epilogue that it was all a petty, transient thing, nothing about it transubstantial, and that here he was just a lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. Dr. Godfrey had spent his entire life terrified of this fate and taking every step to rebel against it by throwing himself into a vocation that was as