“Well, Elspeth, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” said Ana. “Suppression is a significant aspect of the working world. What do people say? ‘It’s business, it’s not personal.’ ”

The blond woman, buoyed by what she perceived as Ana’s defense of her, piped in: “I read in some magazine that if someone at work ever says that to you, like because you were crying or something? That what you should say is: ‘It might be business, but I’m a person, so it’s personal.’ ”

Ana took this in then laughed bitterly for a moment until halted by the girl’s crestfallen face. She had meant this anecdote seriously.

“I only have one piece of advice for your generation,” said Ana. The two women leaned in. “Get off Facebook. It will expose you.”

Ana excused herself, gliding through the room on rails, making stops here and there to shake hands, dole out praise, make mention of her most recent settlements and victories.

She was looking for James, because James was her way of differentiating herself from this. Even now, he remained her rock ‘n’ roll connection, some vestige of her childhood in the demimonde. Whenever she drank this much, she longed to believe she had just been dropped into her work, temporarily, like someone in a witness protection program. This part of the job was tolerated for the sake of the hours it allowed her in the office. If she could suffer through these nights (and she did, adored by all), then she could retreat tomorrow to the sprawling problems waiting to be clipped and contained on her computer.

He was in the shadows, back to her, arms moving, beer sloshing out of his glass. When he pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.

“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.

“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent traveling with a film crew and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.

“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana, reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.

“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air, and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.

The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer—salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past—and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.

James said: “We should call Ethel.”

“Should we?”

He dialed, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing streetlight, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Was that where James had gotten the idea for his?

But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.

“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.

“With Finn. Everything’s good.”

“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”

“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.

Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.

“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.

Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”

Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright, and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage. I could have done that, he thought. I could have been that! This exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys older than thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.

James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men who looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick who seemed black in the dark.

“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.

He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to an alleyway, and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed at himself: “That kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?

He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.

Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.

She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous. (An organ? Did they bring out a goddamn organ, too?)

“My God. How weird is this.” She said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”

Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.

“I don’t—this is Ruth.”

“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.

Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.

“Do you want—” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.

“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations but inhaled deeply anyway.

James gave Emma a backstory: A few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother, whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, she’d stolen a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-colored cartoon character outlined in black ink.