The Vic’s mouth is full of sandwich. “I’m not really afraid of anything,” he says, and with slow wonder, Padgett, as women think about men so often, cannot believe how stupid he is. “If you meet me halfway,” he says, “I think we can make this work.”

“Halfway to what?” Padgett says.

“We get along,” the Vic insists. “We talk, at the table. In bed. On the balcony. We tell each other things, the stories of things. I never had that with anybody except stoned and twenty.”

Padgett feels her own eyes widen. She does not know any of this. Right now she does not remember a single moment with this man that would lead here.

“Everyone,” she says, “if you marry me, will say you married too soon. I’ll be, we both will be tilted like that. The second wife.”

“They said that the first time,” the Vic says. “Maureen got pregnant. We knew each other for something like nothing, no time at all.”

“Really?”

“One of the things,” the Vic says, feeding another chunk to the wary baby, “that I love, is that you don’t read up on me much.”

“Whereas you,” Padgett says, “track my albums.”

“It’s the nature of the beast,” the Vic says, and points at himself. “If it wasn’t for you I’d be clambering all over everybody. It sounds, I know how it sounds, but marriage is a civilizing influence.”

“Was it that for you?”

The Vic takes her hand, warm from the mug of tea. “It will be,” he says.

“I mean with Maureen.”

His face darkens. Padgett can feel something move from his hand to hers, not just pressure but something cracklier.

“What?” she asks him.

“You don’t know this?”

“I clearly,” she says, “don’t know anything.”

The Vic looks quick at the door, in sudden reverie or checking for spies. “Maureen and I,” he says, “basically hated each other,” and she feels it, a wave of emancipation as if some heavy bad roof were lifted and the wind can rush through her hair and furniture. Even the baby kicks, and now she can remember:

—“OK, I’ll tell one,” and the Vic blows a smoke ring—he’s breezing through a box of cigars this week, gifted leftovers from a photo shoot—out into the sky from the balcony. Padgett stands with him, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans, which feels a little trashy.

“Goes like this,” the Vic says. “First five weeks with our new CFO, every morning I’d put a little screw on his desk.”

“What?”

“His office had a very old ceiling fan, Art Deco I think, the decorator found. Right over his desk. I grabbed random stuff from a hardware store, everything tiny, washers and screws and springs. Every morning, I’d leave one right in the middle of his desk.”

“Was this a symbolic thing? Screw you?”