“Just to make the introduction. It’ll take one minute. I can follow up later with a proper pitch.”

“Not up to it. I don’t know these people.”

The intermission mix, the choice of which was the headliner’s prerogative, was impeccably quirky. (Katz, as a headliner, had always hated the posturing and gamesmanship and didacticism of choosing the mix, the pressure to prove himself groovy in his listening tastes, and had left it to his bandmates.) Roadies were setting out a great many mikes and instruments while Walter gushed about the Conor Oberst story: how he’d started recording at twelve, how he was still based in Omaha, how his band was more like a collective or a family than an ordinary rock group. Kiddies were streaming onto the floor from every portal, Bright-Eyed (what a fucking irritating youth-congratulating name for a band, Katz thought) and bushless-tailed. His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world’s splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement-to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. And so said to him: die.

Oberst took the stage alone, wearing a powder-blue tuxedo, strapped on an acoustic, and crooned a couple of lengthy solo numbers. He was the real deal, a boy genius, and thus all the more insufferable to Katz. His Tortured Soulful Artist shtick, his self-indulgence in pushing his songs past their natural limits of endurance, his artful crimes against pop convention: he was performing sincerity, and when the performance threatened to give sincerity the lie, he performed his sincere anguish over the difficulty of sincerity. Then the rest of the band came out, including three lovely young backup Graces in vampish dresses, and it was all in all a great show-Katz didn’t stoop to denying it. He merely felt like the one stone-sober person in a room full of drunks, the one nonbeliever at a church revival. He was pierced by a homesickness for Jersey City, its belief-killing streets. It seemed to him he had some work to do there, in his own splintered niche, before the world ended entirely.

“What did you think?” Walter asked him giddily in the taxi afterward.

“I think I’m getting old,” he said.

“I thought they were pretty great.”

“A few too many songs about adolescent soap operas.”

“They’re all about belief,” Walter said. “The new record’s this incredible kind of pantheistic effort to keep believing in something in a world full of death. Oberst works the word ‘lift’ into every song. That’s the name of the record, Lifted. It’s like religion without the bullshit of religious dogma.”

“I admire your capacity for admiring,” Katz said. And added, as the taxi crawled through traffic at a complex diagonal intersection, “I don’t think I can do this thing for you, Walter. I’m experiencing high levels of shame.”

“Just do what you can. Find your own limits. If all you want to do is come down in May for a day or two and meet the interns, maybe have sex with one of them, that’s fine with me. That would be a lot already.”

“Thinking of going back to writing songs.”

“That’s great! That’s wonderful news. I’d almost rather have you do that than work for us. Just stop building decks, for God’s sake.”

“Might need to keep building decks. Can’t be helped.”

The mansion was dark and quiet when they returned to it, a single light burning in the kitchen. Walter went straight up to bed, but Katz lingered for a while in the kitchen, thinking Patty might hear him and come down. Aside from everything else, he was now craving the company of someone with a sense of irony. He ate some cold pasta and smoked a cigarette in the back yard. Then he went up to the second floor and back to the little room of Patty’s. From the pillows and blankets he’d seen on the foldout sofa the evening before, he had the impression that she slept in it. The door was closed and no light showed around its edges.

“Patty,” he said in a voice she could have heard if she’d been awake.

He listened carefully, enveloped in tinnitus.

“Patty,” he said again.

His dick didn’t believe for one second that she was sleeping, but it was possible that the door was closed on an empty room, and he had a curious reluctance to open it and see. He needed some small breath of encouragement or confirmation of his instincts. He went back down to the kitchen, finished the pasta, and read the Post and the Times. At two o’clock, still buzzing with nicotine, and beginning to be pissed off with her, he went back to her room, tapped on the door, and opened it.

She was sitting on the sofa in the dark, still wearing her black gym uniform, staring straight ahead, her hands clutching each other on her lap.

“Sorry,” Katz said. “Is this OK?”

“Yes,” she said, not looking at him. “But we should go downstairs.”

There was an unfamiliar tightness in his chest as he descended the back staircase again, an intensity of sexual anticipation that he didn’t think he’d felt since high school. Following him into the kitchen, Patty closed the door to the staircase behind her. She was wearing very soft-looking socks, the socks of somebody whose feet weren’t so young and well-padded anymore. Even without the boost of shoes, her height was the same agreeable surprise it had always been to him. One of his own song lyrics popped into his head, the one about her body being the body for him. It had come to this for old Katz: he was being moved by his own lyrics. And the body for him was still very nice, not actively displeasing in any way: the product, surely, of many hours of sweating at her gym. In white block letters on the front of her black T-shirt was the word lift.

“I’m going to have some chamomile tea,” she said. “Do you want some?”

“Sure. I don’t think I’ve ever had chamomile tea.”

“Ah, what a sheltered life you’ve lived.”

She went out to the office and came back with two mugs of instantly hot water with tea-bag labels dangling.

“Why didn’t you answer me when I went up the first time?” he said. “I’ve been sitting down here for two hours.”

“I guess I was lost in thought.”

“Did you think I was just going to go to bed?”

“I don’t know. I was sort of thinking without thinking, if you know what I mean. But I understood that you would want to talk to me, and I knew I had to do it. And so here I am.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“No, it’s good, we should talk.” She sat down across the farmer’s table from him. “Did you guys have a good time? Jessie said you went to a concert.”

“Us and about eight hundred twenty-one-year-olds.”

“Ha-ha-ha! You poor thing.”

“Walter enjoyed himself.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. He’s quite the enthusiast about young people these days.”

Katz was encouraged by the note of discontent. “I take it you’re not?”

“Me? Safe to say no. I mean, my own children excepted. I do still like my own children. But the rest of them? Ha-ha-ha!”

Her thrilling, lifting laugh hadn’t changed. Underneath her new haircut, though, underneath her eye makeup, she was looking older. It only went in one direction, aging, and the self-protective core of him, seeing it, was telling him to run while he still could. He’d followed an instinct in coming down here, but there was a big difference, he was realizing, between an instinct and a plan.