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told me what you thought of him personally.”
    “Personally I thought he was an acquaintance of my father’s.”
    “That’s all?”
    Alden shook his head. “He was this unimpressive little guy in a loud tweed jacket. He thought he looked like the Prince of Wales, but actually he looked like a pickpocket.”
    Davey seemed too shocked to speak, and Alden went on. “Hey, I always thought the Prince of Wales looked like a pickpocket, too. Driver was a very talented writer. What I thought of him when I was a little boy doesn’t matter. What kind of guy he was doesn’t matter either.”
    “Hugo Driver was a great writer.” Davey uttered this sentence to his plate.
    “No argument here.”
    “He was.”
    Alden smiled meaninglessly, inserted another section of lobster into his mouth, and followed it with a swallow of wine. Davey vibrated with suppressed resentment. Alden said, “You know my rule: a great publisher never reads his own books. Gets in the way of your judgment. While we’re on this subject, do we have anything for our friend Leland Dart?”
    This was the most exalted of their lawyers, the partner of Leo Morris in the firm of Dart, Morris.
    Davey said he was working on it.
    “To be truthful, I wonder if our friend Leland might be playing both ends against the middle.”
    “Does this have something to do with the Driver estate?” Nora asked.
    “Please, Nora,” Davey said. “Don’t.”
    “Don’t what? Did I just become invisible?”
    “You know what’s interesting about Leland Dart?” Alden asked, clearly feeling the obligation to rescue the conversation. “Apart from his utter magnificence, and all that? His relationship with his son. I don’t get it. Do you get it? I mean Dick—I sort of understood what happened with the older one, Petey, but Dick just baffles me. Does that guy actually do anything?”
    Davey was laughing now. “I don’t think he does, no. We met him a month or two ago, remember, Nora? At Gilhoolie’s, right after it opened.”
    Nora did remember, and the memory of the appalling person named Dick Dart could now amuse her, too. Dart had been two years behind Davey at the Academy. She had been introduced to him at the bar of a restaurant which had replaced a mediocre pizza parlor in the Waldbaum’s shopping center. Men and women in their twenties and thirties had crowded the long bar separating the door from the dining room, and the menus in plastic cases on the red-checked tables advertised drinks like Mudslides and Long Island Iced Teas. As she and Davey had passed through the crowd, a tall, rather fey-looking man had turned to Davey, dropped a hand on his arm, and addressed him with an odd mixture of arrogance and diffidence. He wore a nice, slightly rumpled suit, his tie had been yanked down, and his fair hair drooped over his forehead. He appeared to have consumed more than a sufficient number of Mudslides. He had said something like
I suppose you’re going to pretend that you don’t remember our old nighttime journeys anymore.
    During Davey’s denial, the man had tilted back his head and peered from one Chancel to the other in a way that suggested they made an amusing spectacle. Nora had endured ironic compliments to her “valiant” face and “lovely” hair. After telling Davey that he should come around by himself some night to talk about the wild rides they’d enjoyed together, Dart had released them, but not before adding that he
adored
Nora’s scent. Nora had not been wearing a scent. Once they reached their table, Nora had said that she’d make Davey sleep in the garage if he ever had anything to do with that languid jerk. Give me a break, Davey had said, Dart’s trying to get in your pants. He gets it all from old Peter O’Toole movies. More like old George Sanders movies, Nora answered, wondering if anyone ever got laid by pretending to despise the person he wanted to seduce.
    Midway through the tasteless meal, Nora had looked up at the bar and seen