“Right, being a dickhead is really time-consuming. What the fuck are you even calling me for?”

“Wondered how things are going with you.”

“You mean, apart from you being a total loser and fucking us over in fifty different ways and lying to us constantly?”

Katz smiled. “Maybe you can write out your grievances and present them to me in written form, so we can talk about something else now.”

“I already did that, asshole. Have you checked your e-mail in the last year?”

“Well, just give me a call then, if you feel like it, later. My phone’s operative again.”

“Your phone is operative again! That’s a good one, Richard. How’s your computer? Is that operative again, too?”

“Just saying I’m around if you want to call.”

“And just go fuck yourself is all I’m saying.”

Katz set down his phone feeling good about the conversation. He thought it unlikely that Tim would have bothered abusing him if he had something better than Walnut Surprise in the works. He drank one last beer, ate one of the killer mirtazapines that a script-happy doctor in Berlin had given him, and slept for thirteen hours.

He woke to a blazing hot afternoon and took a walk in his neighborhood, checking out females dressed in this year’s style of skimpy clothes, and bought some actual groceries-peanut butter, bananas, bread. Later on, he drove into Hoboken to leave his Strat with his guitar man there and yielded to an impulse to dine at Maxwell’s and catch whatever act was playing. The staff at Maxwell’s treated him like a General MacArthur returning from Korea in defiant disgrace. Chicks kept leaning over him with their tits falling out of their little tops, some guy he didn’t know or had once known but long since forgotten kept him supplied with beer, and the local band that was playing, Tutsi Picnic, did not repel him. On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one. Being free of the Berglunds was proving to be a milder and not at all unpleasant sort of death, a death without sting, a state of merely partial nonexistence in which he was able to go back to the apartment of a fortyish book editor (“huge, huge fan”) who’d cozied up to him while Tutsi Picnic played, wet his dick in her a few times, and then, in the morning, buy himself some crullers on his way back down Washington Street to move his truck before parking-meter hours commenced.

There was a message from Tim on his home phone and none from the Berglunds. He rewarded himself by playing guitar for four hours. The day was gloriously hot and loud with street life awakening from a long winter’s dormancy. His left fingertips, bare of calluses, were near the point of bleeding, but the underlying nerves, killed several decades earlier, were still helpfully dead. He drank a beer and went around the corner to his favorite gyro place, intending to have a snack and play some more. When he returned to his building, carrying meat, he found Patty sitting on the front steps.

She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”

His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.

Jonathan and Jenna’s mother, Tamara, had hurt herself in Aspen. Trying to avoid collision with a hotdogging teenager, she’d crossed her skis and snapped two bones in her left leg, above the boot, and thereby disqualified herself from joining Jenna on Jenna’s January trip to ride horses in Patagonia. To Jenna, who’d witnessed Tamara’s wipeout and pursued the teenager and reported him while Jonathan attended to their fallen mother, the accident was just the latest entry in a long list of things going wrong in her life since her graduation from Duke the previous spring; but to Joey, who’d been talking to Jenna twice or thrice daily in recent weeks, the accident was a much-needed little gift from the gods-the breakthrough he’d been waiting two-plus years for. Jenna, after graduating, had moved to Manhattan to work for a famous party planner and try living with her almost-fiancé, Nick, but in September she’d rented her own apartment, and in November, yielding to relentless overt pressure from her family and to more subtle underminings from Joey, who’d made himself her Designated Understander, she declared her relationship with Nick null and void and unrevivable. By that point, she was taking a highish dose of Lexapro and had nothing in her life to look forward to except riding horses in Patagonia, which Nick had repeatedly promised to do with her and repeatedly postponed, citing his heavy work load at Goldman Sachs. It happened that Joey had ridden a horse or two, albeit clumsily, during his high-school summer in Montana. From the high volume of Jenna’s calls and texts to his cell phone, he already suspected that he’d been promoted to the status of transitional object, if not to potential full-on boyfriend, and his last doubts were dispelled when she invited him to share the luxurious Argentinean resort room that Tamara had booked before the accident. Since it further happened that Joey had business in nearby Paraguay and knew that he would probably end up having to go there, whether he wanted to or not, he said yes to Jenna without hesitation. The only real argument against traveling with her in Argentina was the fact that, five months earlier, at the age of twenty, in a fit of madness in New York City, he’d gone to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan and married Connie Monaghan. But this was by no means the worst of his worries, and he chose, for the moment, to overlook it.

The night before he flew to Miami, where Jenna was visiting a grandparent and would meet him at the airport, he called Connie in St. Paul with the news of his impending travel. He was sorry to have to obfuscate and dissemble with her, but his South American plans did give him a good excuse to further postpone her coming east and moving into the highway-side apartment that he’d rented in a charmless corner of Alexandria. Until a few weeks ago, his excuse had been college, but he was now taking a semester off to manage his business, and Connie, who was miserable at home with Carol and Blake and her infant twin half sisters, couldn’t understand why she still wasn’t allowed to live with her husband.

“I also don’t see why you’re going to Buenos Aires,” she said, “if your supplier’s in Paraguay.”

“I want to practice my Spanish a little,” Joey said, “before I really have to use it. Everybody’s talking about what a great city Buenos Aires is. I have to fly through there anyway.”

“Well, do you want to take a whole week and have our honeymoon there?”

Their missing honeymoon was one of several sore subjects between them. Joey repeated his official line on it, which was that he was too freaked out about his business to relax on a vacation, and Connie fell into one of the silences that she deployed in lieu of reproach. She still never reproached him directly.

“Literally anywhere in the world,” he said. “Once I’ve been paid, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.”

“I’d settle for just living with you and waking up next to you, actually.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “That would be great. I’m just under such incredible pressure now, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.”

“You don’t have to be fun,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it when I get back, OK? I promise.”

In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent moving from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.