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don’t think you know them.”
    â€œEd Donlon called. What did he want?”
    â€œHe wants me to talk to someone tomorrow afternoon.”
    â€œGood old dependable Ed,” she said. “I didn’t ask him about Jane. How old is she this time?”
    Wilson stood looking at the television set. Ed Donlon was an old friend, of whom Betsy disapproved. Separated from his wife, Donlon was living temporarily with a younger woman. “If you’re not watching it, why is it on?”
    â€œI told you—I’m waiting. There’s an interview coming. Nancy Reagan is going to be on.”
    â€œWho the hell cares.” He moved resolutely toward the set.
    â€œI do,” she said sharply.
    â€œYou don’t give up on that crowd, do you?”
    â€œYou might at least hear what she has to say.”
    â€œI know what she’s going to say.” He moved across the rag rug to the bookshelves next to the fireplace. In a glass case on a middle shelf were a few artifacts he’d brought back from overseas—Roman coins from Izmir, terra-cottas from Tel Aviv, fragments of a Hittite frieze from Anatolia—together with a few Civil War mementos he and his sons had picked up during their forays about the Virginia battlefields when the two boys were growing up: dumdums, a few brass buttons, fragments of an old canteen, the tip of a broken bayonet. Next to them were the burnished brevets his great-grandfather Carver Wilson had worn at Cold Harbor. Beside the glass case was a Civil War atlas, with a half dozen county road maps folded inside. For four years he’d been searching for rural property in Virginia, with the idea of buying an old farm and opening a rural law practice, like his father’s old firm in southwest Virginia. During the past eight months he’d talked with elderly lawyers in Winchester, Warrenton, and Culpeper. Betsy, the daughter of a retired professor at Sweetbriar, had grown up in small, incestuous college towns and thought she despised rural life. She was under the impression that he was revisiting the old battlefields he’d walked over with his two sons so many years ago.
    He picked up the Civil War atlas and a copy of the new Kissinger memoir, looked again at the television set, and turned back across the room. “I guess I’ll go on upstairs.”
    â€œWhat a poor loser,” she said accusingly. “It’s only Nancy Reagan. Don’t you ever stop thinking about it?”
    â€œThat’s why I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to think about it.”
    â€œThis work you’re doing with real estate is just an escape. You know that as well as I do. Dog in the manger. If you’re not careful, you’ll work yourself into a worse state than Nick Straus.”
    He turned in the doorway. “What about Nick?”
    â€œIda called. She was worried about him. She thought he might be here.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œShe said he disappeared just before dinner, just walked out without a word, rain and all.”
    â€œHe was at The Players. I took him home and we talked a little.”
    â€œShe said he’d been seeing a doctor again—secretly, she said. Did he tell you that? She hoped you might talk to him.”
    â€œPolitics isn’t his problem.”
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    Depressed, he went upstairs and took a shower. Afterward he lay on his bed in the master bedroom, looking at the farm and rural real estate ads from the Sunday Post he kept hidden away in his dresser drawer. Finally, he put the ads aside and browsed through the Kissinger memoirs of the early Nixon presidency, reviewing his commentary on a few of those early crises he was involved with on the Hill. He read a dozen pages, but the solemn Teutonic style gave it the dignity of Thucydides. The back-channel traffic he remembered had read like the Borgias, Kissinger playing Lucrezia.
    The rain