“Nice weather we’re having,” Cynthia said. “I thought you might be on your way already.”

“What are you doing right now?” Adam said.

“Doing? What am I doing?”

“Can you call that Barnard girl? Do you think we could get her to come over and babysit right now?”

“I’m sure we could not,” Cynthia said. “Why?”

“Because here’s what I want to do,” he said, watching the lights flicker on the phones in the silent office. “I want to check into a hotel with you for a couple of hours. I want to go to the nicest place we can think of and have a good dinner and some wine and then I want to take you to bed. I want you to think of something you’ve never asked me to do before and then I’ll do it. I want to amaze you. I want complaints from the front desk. I want to get kicked out of there. Seriously, I am as hard as a rock right now just thinking about you.”

She laughed delightedly. “I believe I’m getting the vapors,” she said. “You better hope this phone’s not tapped, pervert. Maybe you need to call that number for when you experience an erection lasting more than four hours.”

“I’m not kidding, though,” Adam said. “I love you. Seriously, the kids are old enough to be by themselves for a couple of hours, right?”

“No,” she said indulgently, “they are not. They do go to bed early, though. So here’s my counterproposal.” He could hear her walking with the phone into another room. “After they’re asleep, you sit down on the couch, and I will bring you a Scotch, and then I will kneel in front of that couch, and whatever happened to you today, I’m betting that between me and the Scotch we will make it all better. Okay? I love you too, by the way. And I do like the way you think. But this way we won’t have any visits from Child Protective Services. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“We will call that Plan B,” Cynthia said. “Now come home.”

He hung up. It was almost dark now, and the rain on the windows made for a beautiful effect on the opposite wall, like a bleeding shadow. He called the car service and fifteen minutes later he was in the back seat of a limo that sat motionless in the rain on 57th Street, in traffic that was so bad he felt like time had stopped.

Isn’t your father dead, Barry? he had wanted to say. Doesn’t everybody’s father die? Isn’t that what happens? But he’d figured the less he said, the sooner they’d move on. For a long time Adam had known his father mostly as a short-fused bastard, but then in his teenage years something had shifted, and he’d felt like both his parents were a little afraid of him. It wasn’t such a bad feeling, actually.

Even when he wiped the windows with the back of his hand he couldn’t see outside. It didn’t feel like they were moving at all. He thought about laying into the driver for taking 57th in the first place, but that wouldn’t make him feel any better. He just needed for a new day to start.

Sanford owned several secondary homes, but the one of which his current wife was most enamored was in Cornwall, Connecticut, two hours and then some outside the city. The following Thursday at lunch he decided aloud that Adam should visit them there that very weekend, and should bring his wife and kids; initially Adam wasn’t sure how seriously to take him, especially since this was a lunch at Gramercy Tavern that featured lots of wine, but when San-ford’s secretary faxed him driving directions the next day, he phoned Cynthia and gave her the news. She was a sport about it. She asked if the kids should pack their bathing suits, and he answered that he didn’t have the slightest idea.

“I owe you one,” he said. He was actually thinking about San-ford’s wife, whom he had met but Cynthia had not. He didn’t see that going particularly well.

He spent Friday laughing off the mostly good-natured stink eye from everyone else at Perini, none of whom had ever been graced with such an invitation before, though they’d all been employed there longer than he had. The drive upstate the next morning opened gradually into the kind of calendar-art New England hillscape Adam had grown up in-stone walls, church spires, village greens-but Sanford’s house, down at the end of a dirt road they passed twice before finding, was a white Regency-style mansion so gigantic and out of place it looked like a theme park. It sprawled across an expensively produced clearing as if it had been dropped there from the air. Adam turned off the car and the four of them got out and stared. In its inappropriateness the house was so self-absorbed that it could have sprung fully formed from the head of Sanford’s awful wife; still, the sheer ballsiness of it, the arrogance required to raze whatever must have been here before in order to erect this monstrosity precisely where it didn’t belong, was kind of impressive. He knew Sanford had a lot of money but sometimes even someone in Adam’s job had to be reminded what the phrase “a lot of money” really meant.

“This,” Jonas said, “is the coolest house I have ever seen.”

No one came outside to greet them; he wasn’t sure how to let their hosts know they had arrived. Honking felt wrong on multiple levels. “So what time is the next tour?” Cynthia said, but just then Mrs. Sanford #4-she introduced herself to Cyn as Victoria, thank God, because Adam had blanked on her name-came gaily through some side door that they hadn’t even noticed was there.

Sanford himself was waiting in the foyer to shake hands with Cynthia and the children, in whom he took no pains to seem interested, and then he and his wife did something that struck Adam as truly old-school: they segregated their guests immediately by gender, with Victoria taking Cynthia and the kids upstairs and Sanford leading Adam down some steps, through a media room, and onto what turned out to be a screened back porch that faced directly, with only a few feet of mowed grass intervening, into the dense woods. The porch was crowded with dozens of large potted and hanging plants, creating for a moment the effect that the spanking-new house was actually a sort of ruin the birches and pines were intent on reclaiming; but in there among the fauna were two large and very softly upholstered rattan chairs, and in between them was a table that held a pitcher of Bloody Marys. The porch was cool and dark, despite which Sanford wore a pair of sunglasses on a cord around his neck. His own glass was already three-quarters empty-he must have been sitting out here before the Moreys arrived-and he filled Adam’s with a stately flourish. “You have a beautiful family,” he said as he sank back into his chair.

“Thank you,” Adam said. “Where have they been taken?”

“Not much to do out here,” was Sanford ’s answer. “You’re at least a hundred miles from the ocean, is what I don’t like about it. Still, it is quiet.” He took the celery stalk out of his drink and stuck it in his mouth.

Victoria had launched without prelude into a house tour, recounting the difficulties she’d had getting the various painters and decorators and contractors to adhere to her clearly expressed vision, a separate haughty narrative for every room in the mansion. By the fourth or fifth room Cynthia had a powerful urge to burn the whole place to the ground with this Botoxed stick figure inside it. There was no way they could have been more than ten years apart in age-unless she was a mummy, Cynthia reflected while watching the jaw move in her eerily smooth face, or possibly a vampire, preserved for centuries by the blood of her social inferiors-and yet she spoke as if from some great experiential height, as if, at the end of her remarks, there might be time for a few questions.

“Three times, we painted this room,” she was saying, as if she would even know which end of a paintbrush to hold. “And I had a chip from Barry’s house in Stowe for the painter to match. Hello? Is that so hard? But you know how it is up here in these small towns, you just have to make the best of what you’re given, in terms of contractors and such I mean.”