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because they’ll never run out of bad taste.”
    “I don’t like it much either,” she said, “but I don’t feel passionately about it. You must be an intellectual.”
    “I’m not. The war saved me from that.”
    “And what would be so terrible if you were?”
    “They don’t go outside enough.”
    “They don’t, do they.”
    “Not nearly enough.”
    “And you do?”
    “I try,” he said. “And so do you, I think. I can see it in the way you carry yourself, and in your face—unless you got too close to your toaster.”
    “I have one of those toasters that doesn’t get hot unless you’re out of the room so it can burn the toast,” she said parenthetically and as if addressing someone outside their conversation, and then she returned to him. “You mean then that what we see ahead is never beautiful, that breathtaking mass, those heights?”
    “Oh, no, it is,” he said, “when the sun shines against its windows and they echo it. It is, when seen as a whole from certain angles and at certain times of day or night. When it snows, or when you consider the souls that inhabit it. Beautiful not on account of itself, of its design, but in the way nature showers it with unexpected gifts. And the bridges, with the double catenaries, running parallel, high above the rivers. . . .”
    He wanted to move more cautiously and slowly, which meant paying decent respect to the mundane, so he tried. “What I do like, much more than art, is, for example, water running over rocks in a wilderness stream. Just the sound of it is more beautiful than all of Manhattan.” As he said this he swept his arm backward, briefly and tightly, to indicate the city. “There’s something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need do nothing more. It’s alive in a way that’s greater than any description of it, like what you see in someone’s eyes or expression, or hear in her voice.”
    “Do you actually speak this way?” she asked him, rattled by the nature of his reply. Before he could answer, the ferry blasted its whistle three times, and as the first blast echoed off the cliffs of lower Manhattan the boat began to skate into alignment with the slip, its stern skidding toward Brooklyn Heights.
    “When I’m nervous, or in an exam,” he said. “But I also do short answers and multiple choice.”
    “You do? You can answer simple questions, simply?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good, because I think I have a lot of them.”

4. The Moon Rising over the East River
    N EITHER COULD DISENGAGE . To part now would be like lifting the tone arm in the middle of a song, the sudden silence inexplicable. And yet, as they had passed through the terminal they hadn’t exchanged a word. The darkness above, deep and cool, was broken by the repeated flash of wings as jagged and quick as lightning. Catherine felt as if she were in a cathedral. She would remember for the rest of her life the friction of her shoes against the rough floor that sparkled like the Milky Way, which the lights of the city had banished long before, and how despite the arbor of sound—boat whistles, ferry engines, water lapping, waves breaking, the jingle of gates opening and closing, taxi horns, the flutter of birds—they had been encased in their own magnificent silence, aware of almost nothing except one another, electrified with a sense of beginning.
    The air was charged with sunlight, and the streets were crowded with office workers released from financial houses and shipping companies. So that they could stay together, and because the custom had yet to die, Harry offered Catherine his arm, and she took it, lightly, their second touch, a high, intense pleasure out of all proportion to what anyone casually passing may have guessed. He feared that were he not to introduce some sort of conversation as a guide and to slow the rush she would vanish as if in a dream. So he asked her where she would like to have dinner.
    “At four