“You have a budget,” Jonas asked, “from the department for the research you’re doing for your book? To pay for graduate assistants?” Nikki, still holding in her lap all the one-sheet artist bios from the fair she had assembled for Agnew, turned and looked at Jonas in budding surprise.

“Yes and no. The department basically lowers the tuition of the students I have working for me. It’s not like I have actual cash to distribute. But, in any case, I’ve used up my allotment and then some.”

“Would you be willing to take on another one? Off the books? I don’t mean ‘off the books,’ sorry, I just mean that no one would have to pay me anything. It’s not necessary.”

Agnew leaned back. “Well aren’t you the young man on the go,” he said.

“I could do some of this research for you. Check out some of these artists. Maybe even find new ones. I wouldn’t presume to offer you my opinion or anything, like your grad students do, but just legwork. However I could be useful to the project.”

“Why?”

Jonas cursed his own blush, just at the moment he was trying to seem a little older than he was. He was trying not to look at Nikki, whose mouth was hanging open. “Why? I just… All my requirements are done, or just about, and I haven’t found anything that interests me as much as this. It’s like something I’ve been looking for, if that makes any sense. To be honest, I’m already thinking ahead to what I want to do after next year. I think I could get a jump on a thesis this way, not that it would intersect with your work at all, I’d keep that totally separate. But it is a huge field.”

Agnew rocked in his desk chair and drummed his fingertips together in the air for what seemed to Jonas like a minute. “Can I ask you a personal question?” Agnew said.

Jonas nodded.

“I read in the paper, a few months ago, about a guy named Morey, one of those hedge-fund guys, who threw a birthday party for his wife. Rented out the New York Public Library for it. Wyclef Jean played. Those are your parents, aren’t they?”

Jonas nodded again, fidgeting a little.

“Did you go?”

“Sure. It was their anniversary, actually, not her birthday.”

“Some big one, right? Like their twenty-fifth or something?”

“Twenty-third,” Jonas said, and laughed grudgingly. “He does kind of jump the gun sometimes.”

“I have to admit,” Agnew said, “I read about how guys like that make their money, what they do all day, and I don’t grasp it at all. Alternative assets or whatever they’re called, it just bounces right off my brain. And I’m presumably not a dumb guy. But hey-people think what I do for a living is arcane.”

Jonas didn’t smile. “I know what people think about throwing a party like that,” he said, “but the thing is, all the display wasn’t for anybody else’s benefit. It was for her. That’s the way my dad thinks. They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. So I just try to focus on that. That’s the real context of everything they do-each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls. Every family is bizarre from the outside in some way, right?”

But Agnew shook his head. He looked at Nikki and pointed back at Jonas with his thumb. “That’s some end-times shit, your boyfriend’s family,” he said. “That’s okay, though. It’s not possible to hold it against him, and anyway I wouldn’t, because it just makes it more interesting that he’s in here. Because this is some end-times shit too, what we’re doing. I mean, what we’re studying here, what comes after it? That desire to feed on every new expression of what it is to suffer and be human, that need to seek out what’s unfamiliar and make it familiar, it’s like a goddamn fox hunt, and over the centuries it has narrowed down to this. Should we call off the hunt? Probably, but the question is moot anyway, because the world is incapable of leaving art alone. And après nous, what? I don’t know what comes after, what kind of art, what kind of artist. I really don’t. But after all these years, you and I will be there at the end. It’s kind of thrilling, isn’t it?”

Cynthia had learned the hard way to be vigilant about giving out her cell number, but she wound up having to change it every six or eight months anyway. No matter how careful you were, inevitably you were going to start getting calls from total strangers-charities legit and otherwise, journalists, angry socialist crackpots-all of them wanting something, because when you were giving money away, people were terrifically inventive about finding you. At which point it was time to change phones again. Sometimes she’d find herself in the embarrassing position of not knowing her own contact information, but Dawn was always on top of it.

Dawn was in charge of the home phone as well. Though they’d unlisted it, that number had stayed the same for years; Cynthia just never answered it anymore. At the end of the day Dawn gave her a typed list of whatever messages had been left. They were about 95 percent junk, but Cynthia couldn’t bring herself to just change the number or disconnect it; it was too much like telling people who used to know you that they didn’t know you anymore. Adam wouldn’t have minded. The cache of things capable of troubling Adam seemed to clear itself every week or so. She was shocked, sometimes, by the things she had to remind him of, the people they’d met and places they’d visited and times they’d had together that produced a blank, apologetic look on his face when she brought them up.

On Friday afternoon, with Adam and April still in the air on their way to Shanghai, Dawn handed Cynthia the day’s list of home-phone calls and then, unusually, lingered in the door to her office while she read it. Dawn had come to work for her with the announced goal of saving up money to apply to business school; Cynthia had grown to depend on her to such a degree that she now paid her not just enough for business school but so much that business school itself would seem like too big a sacrifice. She was twenty-four, just a couple of years older than April, and scary-competent, and if she’d wanted to she could have found myriad ways to manipulate Cynthia’s obvious affection for her, but she wasn’t that type of person. Boundaries were never an issue. They talked about everything. The poor girl’s taste in men was even worse than a twenty-four-year-old’s should be, and with Dawn’s mother living with a new boyfriend in Queens and functionally out of the picture, Cynthia suffered through Dawn’s nonworking hours imagining all the mistakes a beautiful young girl like that might make.

“What?” Cynthia said quietly, looking over the list.

Dawn shook her head. “Nothing. Just wanted to see if you recognized that last name. I wasn’t sure if it was on the level. But I guess not. Sorry not to catch it.”

Cynthia’s gaze hadn’t actually made it all the way to the bottom of the page. She looked down again and saw the name Irene Ball.

“Nope,” she said. “A name like that I’d remember. Why?”

Dawn shrugged. “She said she was calling on behalf of your father. She wouldn’t say why, though. I kind of had a feeling it was bogus. She actually called three times.”

Cynthia looked down at the name again.

“I mean, this is totally something I should know, but didn’t you tell me that your father had passed away?”

“That was my stepfather.”

Dawn blanched. “I’m sorry. Oh my God. Teach me to ask personal questions.”

Cynthia glanced up at her, then reached out and squeezed her hand. “Please,” she said. “It’s me.”

Saturday morning Cynthia sat in the dining room drinking a protein shake the weekend cook had made, languishing over the paper, and staring out the window at the boat traffic on the churning East River. It was a novelty to have the house all to herself. Not that she was completely alone; there was a housekeeper moving around audibly in the master bedroom above her head, and the cook was on until four, doing prep work for a cocktail reception Cynthia was hosting the next night. It would be strange to host anything without Adam there too, but that kind of thing was happening more and more, as they had to split up to accommodate the foundation’s reach. She was about to go downstairs and read through a few grant proposals on the StairMaster when the home phone rang on the sideboard behind her. She turned to look at the caller ID, which read only, PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER. She pursed her lips. No one else was going to pick it up. Just before the fourth ring, which would send it to voice mail, she answered.