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any good.”
    “I don’t know, Haydn. That doesn’t open a door for me. You understand? It sort of closes a door. If she wants an eighteenth-century country kitchen she should live in an old country house.”
    “I know, I know.” Goodwin roughly claps his hand on Paul’s shoulder, gives it a jokey, angry squeeze with his powerful, plaster-dusted hand. “I figured you would say that. But I wanted to give it a shot. So let me ask you this, my friend. Do you remember those flat-plane cabinets you made for Jann Wenner? With all that beautiful old cypress? You have more of it squirreled away up there in the country, am I right? A little birdie told me you’ve got four thousand feet of northwest cypress and you once told me yourself you’ve got a massive collection of old bin-pull handles.”
    “Actually,” Paul says, “that wasn’t cypress, and it wasn’t vintage.”
    “That wasn’t old wood?” Goodwin says, amazed.
    “I aged it with gray patina over cream paint.”
    Goodwin shakes his head. “In the photographs it looks like the real deal.”
    “It does in real life, too,” Paul says.
    “So? What about it?”
    “I can tell whoever you get how to age the wood. Or you can. It’s simple.”
    “And that’s it? How about the old cypress? How about the bin-pulls?”
    “I can’t do that,” Paul says. “I keep my stock for my own projects.”
    “I can pay you top dollar.”
    “It could never be worth to you what it’s worth to me, Haydn.”
    “Let me be the judge of that,” Goodwin says, his good humor all but vanished. Goodwin continues to work on Paul, beseeching him one moment, berating him the next. Paul keeps his eyes on Goodwin and gives every impression of considering the contractor’s arguments, but in fact he’s barely listening, until all at once Paul realizes with a jolt of dread that his truck is in a no-parking zone. It would be one thing to get a ticket along with a job, but to get a ticket instead of a job…
    “I have to get out of here,” Paul says. “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
    “I want that wood and the hardware, too,” Goodwin says, pointing at him and smiling falsely. He makes a sudden move, as if to throw his shoulder into Paul or make some insane attempt to tackle him, and Paul feels a spout of adrenaline rising through him.
    “Haydn, she wants you,” a voice says. It’s one of Goodwin’s crew, a young, cherub-faced man in his twenties, with his protective eye-wear pulled back into his plaster-flecked hair.
    “Is anything wrong?” Goodwin anxiously asks.
    The young helper shrugs. “She just said get you.”
    Without another word, Goodwin leaves the kitchen and disappears into the apartment. Paul stands there for a moment; it is only in the wake of Goodwin’s absence that Paul realizes how angry he feels. As he finds his way back to the front door he thinks: I should have clocked him .
    His agitation continues on the walk back to the Episcopal church where he defied both God and Caesar by parking his truck, and even from a distance he can see the parking ticket lodged beneath his windshield wiper, one end shuddering in the dank November breeze, the other stuck to the windshield’s condensation. Oh come on , Paul says, as if there were something petty and unjust about his getting a parking ticket, though, in fact, he has gotten caught four times this year alone. It’s easy for him to forget that, since he hasn’t yet paid any of the fines. He pulls the ticket free of the wiper blade and sticks it in his back pocket, where he will keep it before it joins the others shoved into the rear of the glove compartment.
    Driving uptown, and getting ready to turn west so he can head back to Leyden, Paul finds that the street he was going to take is closed and he must go east a block and then north before heading west again. But while he is going east he decides, almost without thought, to keep going all the way to First Avenue so he can drive past the apartment building