Deario. Rachel flutters at it, knowing she’s being silly, ridiculous. She is married. She married Ben Nickels in a ceremony and everything. This man, of course he is a man despite some animal whisper she keeps half-hearing, smells like cigarettes, something she gave up. When she got tired of lingering outside buildings like a target. He can likely smell the whiskey on her and she has not, shut up she hasn’t, become a woman who hangs around bars for men to go home with. She just drinks here a little. This morning, every morning, she makes her bed.

“I think this is why there are jukeboxes,” Reynard says, “so these awful silences will instead be full of music and joy.”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel says right away. “I was staring, I think.” She still is. Reynard slithers to a stand, takes a bill out of his pocket and flattens it for the machine’s devouring. “For a minute you looked familiar, like the guy who married me.”

“I look like your husband?”

“No. The man who performed the ceremony.”

“Indeed?”

“You’re about,” Rachel says, “the same height, I guess.”

“Not enough for identification,” Reynard says, and looks—right—at—her. “They found a man early this morning down by Aquatic Park. Watch and wallet gone, face hammered to a pulp and scratches every which place. They still don’t know who he is.”

Martin steps back up the steps. The room is throttling with what was said, and the barman has not heard it but feels it. The juke plays a slumbery song that Rachel—Reynard caught the scent of this—used for comfort in her dorm room while a long-haired boy full of hashish and Ayn Rand terrorized her heart for a semester or so. Every pulse of hers rockets. Reynard sits back down and his body, his flesh, lays siege to her breath. The cover of the album has tribesmen carrying a snake across an urban backyard. By instinct Martin makes the drinks with lemon and caution, a gazelle eyeing a shadow on the plain.

“And how’s the marriage?” Reynard asks, folding his hands over the cocktail napkin, which is stenciled with little tall trees.

“It’s going fine,” Rachel says. “Still married, very happy.”

“It’s wonderful to combine, isn’t it?” Reynard asks her. “Melding lives, melding bodies. Till death or something do you part.”

“Or something,” Rachel says, like a hypnotized echo.

“Yes,” Reynard says. “I wonder what that could be.”