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could be very dangerous. Consider nuclear investedness: The cost of mining uranium had gone from ten to nearly forty dollars a pound while the price had dropped from forty dollars a pound to just under twenty-eight. The airline they’d bought only needed dynamic top executives to reverse their last year’s losses of twenty million. When she whistled at this news she completely failed to understand that the superiority of his firm lay in the fact that they had lost thirty-seven million. However, he would have described her as a clever woman.
    Her sister came to town and he was not to see Renée for a week or so. He missed her keenly. The physical deprivation was considerable and acute. On the day that her sister left she agreed to meet him for lunch and invited him to her place at one. He imagined that she would greet him in her old blue wrapper and that after they had made love he would send out for sandwiches. Dressing for the rendezvous he tried to remember what ties, shirts and suits she had said she liked, but then it occurred to him that he would be out of his clothes a minute or two after he entered her apartment and that there was no point in deliberating over his wardrobe. He even decided against underwear lest it delay his achieving nakedness. As we watch Sears put his genitalsinto his trousers it is worth observing the look on his face.
    Sears was a thoughtful man and there was no effrontery or arrogance here, but he seemed to enjoy something very like authority, as if this most commonplace organ, possessed by absolutely every other man on the planet, were some singular treasure, such as the pen that was used for signing the Treaty of Versailles, robbing Bulgaria of Macedonia, giving her Aegean coast to Greece, creating several new quarrelsome nations in the Balkans, expatriating and leaving homeless large populations, giving Poland a corridor to the Baltic and sowing the seeds for future discord and war. Putting his genitals into his trousers Sears seemed to think he was handling history.
    There were no cabs that day. He more or less ran to her apartment and was winded when he got into the elevator in her building. “Twelve B,” he said to the elevator operator. It was the same man who had taken him down on his first morning. His face seemed to Sears to possess some innocence and so he could not attribute meanness to the exchange that followed.
    “Are you her father?” the elevator man asked.
    “No,” said Sears. He could barely speak.
    “Her grandfather?”
    “I am her uncle,” said Sears.
    “Then you must have known her when she was a little girl,” said the elevator man. “She must have been terribly pretty. She’s beautiful now but I keep thinking about how she must have looked when she was a girl.”
    It was a blow to Sears, a stunning blow, although he should have been able to anticipate this in the way shewagged her ass around. Just following her to a table in a restaurant inaugurated an erotic competition that would leave the waiters, and any other players, obliged to dismiss Sears as an old man who, with his clothes off, would present nothing interesting but a costly wristwatch. He had been aware of the competition but he had always thought himself victorious. The blow was devastating.
    When she opened the door she was not wearing her old blue wrapper. She was wearing the suit she had been wearing when she first showed him an apartment, and she also wore gloves and a hat. She was wearing the glasses she wore to read by and another pair of glasses—dark—either for cosmetic reasons or to screen the light.
    “Oh, my darling,” he groaned.
    “I’ve made a reservation at the Tombeau de Couperin,” she said.
    “I’ve missed you terribly,” he said. “I’m so hardpacked that I can’t eat.” He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to his knees.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I cannot help you.”
    “Don’t you speak to me like that,” he said. “Don’t talk to me as if