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listening, exhausted by the information he already knew by heart. Sirens called his attention away as they swam across the windows.
    â€œMen cheat. Women cheat. You’ll cheat one day, or Del will. It’s like death. You can’t prepare yourself for it, you just have to accept that it’s eventually going to happen.”
    Joseph downed the last of his beer. “Come on, aren’t we both tired of feeling sorry for you? If you think your career is such shit, do something about it.”
    â€œI intend to,” he said. The intoxication of two pints had marshaled some emergency supply of hope: beyond all of the sunlight pouring
through the oily windows of the Hairy Bishop, opportunity did exist. His doorman was still accepting script deliveries, wasn’t he? His e-mail account was still collecting messages. He and Joseph had the same agent. She was at her desk right now, wasn’t she, presumably digging into projects invented fresh every hour?
    â€œThe problem is,” Joseph said, as if this observation had been building force in his throat for a while, “you like to be taken care of.”
    William let that comment hang between them, pretending to roll it over in his head. What did Joseph know about women anyway? Del had pulled Joseph off of a market that had little interest in him to begin with. The guy hardly dated. His stories of one-night stands were so hopelessly banal, so cut and run, that William had to rethink his long-held opinion that the people who acted the most prudish in public were the world’s dirtiest perverts when given a few hours alone. He had once checked his e-mail on Joseph’s computer and covertly searched the Internet history expecting to find a flock of addresses guiding him to hardcore porn sites. All he found were conspiracy-theory chat rooms. It seemed so out of character for a man who listened to the stories William told without ever bothering to question their veracity that the discovery of 9/11 sites and Kennedymafia plots took on a more extreme perversion than snuff films would have. William chalked it up to boredom. Except for those Web sites, William’s file on Joseph was so clean it was almost unnerving. Almost. He did know one thing, and he never dared to mention it. Joseph kept a loaded gun in a metal box underneath his bed. He found it the same way he found those Web sites: by snooping.
    William wondered if Del knew about the conspiracy chat rooms. Or the gun. But maybe Joseph was right. Maybe William liked being taken care of too much. And maybe Joseph had simply learned how to take care of himself.
    â€œWill you be honest with me?” William said, entangling his feet around the legs of Joseph’s stool. His brown eyes were faded with worry. “Are you getting work? I mean, are you going out for auditions? Because I’ve got nothing.”
    â€œIt’s slow for everyone right now,” Joseph replied. He must have
understood that William’s complaints had merely been a preamble to this admission of failure. “I’m up for a spot or two.”
    â€œWell, that’s something.” William once confided his deepest fears in Joseph, but over the years there had grown some kernel of distrust, of jealousy, a little seed that could almost be classified as hate. While William’s career had sputtered and stalled through the last of his twenties, Joseph’s had taken shape. His bland, generically handsome looks had suddenly found an interested audience, while William’s darker, arrogant features started to read as too malevolent for toothpaste or greeting card spots. Like he was the kind of guy who couldn’t be counted on to remember birthdays or dental appointments. There were carefully concealed moments of joy when Joseph failed to land a role he had worked hard for. For William, jealousy was a survival instinct. He didn’t want Joseph destroyed, he simply wanted to beat him, to reach his arms out