“I’m all she has,” he said, “for better or worse.” He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and tapped one on his wrist. “Her mother died last year. Our mother, I should say. I didn’t know her, aside from the letters. She left when I was a baby. I don’t think she took very good care of herself, or of Alma for that matter. She died of heart failure.” He lit a cigarette and settled in the armchair near Effie, on the opposite side of the coffee table from Clara.

“You so rarely speak of your family,” Clara said.

“There’s not much to speak of.”

“He says humbly. Your family built the third-largest shipping company in the world.”

Max put his feet up. “My father was a miserable old man,” he said to Effie, “and my mother was a failed starlet. The rest of my family were teetotalers, descended from Quakers, like Ahab. They’re all dead now, the ones I cared about.”

“How sad,” Effie said.

“Yes,” Max said, simply, and the silence that followed was awkward. Henry broke it by jiggling the ice in his glass, and Max got up to take it, and Effie’s as well, and went over to the bar. Another drink was going to put Henry over the edge—but no matter. The day shimmered in his head.

“Oh, Maxie, let’s just go to Hawaii,” Clara said. It seemed to be a continuation of some other conversation. “I mean really, why not?”

“I told you,” Max said, dropping fresh ice into their glasses. “I would go.”

“Hawaii—yes,” Henry said emphatically, and Effie laughed and said, “Are you drunk?”

“Of course he’s drunk,” Max said. “Bravo. So am I.”

“You could come with us if you wanted,” Clara said, to Henry and Effie. “The more, the merrier. There’s nude beaches. We could lie out in the sun as nature intended.”

“We’d make a handsome set,” Max said.

Henry imagined the four of them lying naked on the beach before a vast turquoise sea, while Alma played out in the waves ahead of them.

“God knows I’d love to spend my life loafing around,” Effie said dryly, tilting her head back to see Max. “But alas.”

Her tone was an act. Under the afghan Henry had pushed his finger past the elastic hem of her bathing suit, and she’d opened her legs a bit so he could reach her. She was wet. The muscles in her groin tensed.