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drifting snow, and lighted tugboats floating like lanterns on the East River. A voluptuous couch, upholstered in mocha velvet, faced the fireplace, and in front of it, on a table lacquered the yellow of the floor, rested an ice-filled silver bucket; embedded in the bucket was a carafe brimming with pepper-flavored red Russian vodka.
    Her husband hesitated in the doorway, and nodded at her approvingly: he was one of those men who truly noticed a woman’s appearance, gathered at a glance the total atmosphere. He was worth dressing for, and it was one of her lesser reasons for loving him. A more important reason was that he resembled her father, a man who had been, and forever would be, the man in her life; her father had shot himself, though no one ever knew why, for he was a gentleman of almost abnormal discretion. Before this happened, she had terminated three engagements, but two months after her father’s death she met George, andmarried him because in both looks and manners he approximated her great lost love.
    She moved across the room to meet her husband halfway. She kissed his cheek, and the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowflakes at the window. He was a large man, Irish, black-haired and green-eyed, handsome even though he had lately accumulated considerable poundage and had gotten a bit jowly, too. He projected a superficial vitality; both men and women were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause.
    She said: “It’s such a rotten night out, and you look so tired. Let’s stay home and have supper by the fire.”
    “Really, darling—you wouldn’t mind? It seems a mean thing to do to the Haleses. Even if she is a cunt.”
    “ George! Don’t use that word. You know I hate it.”
    “Sorry,” he said; he was, too. He was always careful not to offend her, just as she took the same care with him: a consequence of the quiet that simultaneously kept them together and apart.
    “I’ll call and say you’re coming down with a cold.”
    “Well, it won’t be a lie. I think I am.”
    WHILE SHE CALLED THE HALESES , and arranged with Anna for a soup and soufflé supper to be served in an hour’s time, he chugalugged a dazzling dose of the scarlet vodka and felt it light a fire in his stomach; before his wife returned, he poured himself a respectable shot and stretched full length on the couch. She knelt on the floor and removed his shoes and began to massage his feet: God knows, he didn’t have hairy heels. He groaned.
    “Hmm. That feels good.”
    “I love you, George.”
    “I love you, too.”
    She thought of putting on a record, but no, the sound of the fire was all the room needed.
    “George?”
    “Yes, darling.”
    “What are you thinking about?”
    “A woman named Ivory Hunter.”
    “You really know somebody named Ivory Hunter?”
    “Well. That was her stage name. She’d been a burlesque dancer.”
    She laughed. “What is this, some part of your college adventures?”
    “I never knew her. I only heard about her once. It was the summer after I left Yale.”
    He closed his eyes and drained his vodka. “The summer I hitchhiked out to New Mexico and California. Remember? That’s how I got my nose broke. In a bar fight in Needles, California.” She liked his broken nose, it offset the extreme gentleness of his face; he had once spoken of having it re-broken and reset, but she had talked him out of it. “It was early September, and that’s always the hottest time of the year in Southern California; over a hundred almost every day. I ought to have treated myself to a bus ride, at least across the desert. But there I was like a fool, deep in the Mojave, hauling a fifty-pound knapsack and sweating until there was no sweat in me. I swear it was a hundred and fifty in the shade. Except there wasn’t any shade. Nothing but sand and mesquite and