He leans back into her arm. It is, she thinks, ridiculous and stupid, she’s in agreement about that. To wait for a parade, to be putting your own clothes in a dead wife’s closet, to be photographed leaving a party, making glasses the old Italian way, to be married—and here she is thinking of the night they met—in a fake forest. Ridiculous dreams in a sack, and then you share a sack with some other ridiculous dreamer. They are kissing again and finishing the bottle. “I’ll help you,” she says. “I’ll get it for you.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will, I will.” She has been looking, it’s true, for the reason she’s staying with the Vic. This is it. Another man is not the best reason, maybe, but if not a job—

“Why would you?”

“It’s right, you’re right.” She’s hungry at his mouth. “He’s a schemer, he’s unscrupulous. He lives like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t believe it. It scares me, what he’s got socked away …” She trails off here, looks fruitlessly for her reflection in the jukebox window. “Or locked in a basement.”

Martin turns the done bottle like a wheel in his hands. “If you married him,” he says, “both of us could get what we want, I think.”

“He’s not going to marry me,” Padgett says, and sighs like a math teacher giving up on the slow kid. “I am barely grasping the banister of my life, and he is crowning himself king of his own goddamn accomplishments. His dead wife was a mover, another powerful icon or what have you. Some school based on the principles of Japanese folklore.”

“Yeah, I think I clicked on that somewhere.”

“With cabernet in him, he won’t stop talking about it. He has a baby, and the very thought of children panics me, that they exist.”

“Don’t pretend he’s icky to you.”

“You’re icky, Icke.”

“You know what I’m asking,” he says, nervous and rough in his throat. “Do you want him? Or do you want—”

“Sometimes,” she says, the bar getting spinnier. “Don’t growl like that. I’m just telling you the truth. The water pressure in his shower is the most—”

“Well, it’s the truth too that I’m jealous. He takes off your clothes. That’s the worst part. I close up here, and go home and think about him slipping you out of your underwear.”

“Don’t think like that, then. And you handed me over. Pal around, you just said it.”

“It was just a plan then.”