“It’s right here, Dad.” Frankie took his coat off the nearby rack. “Let me put it on you. It’s cold outside. February in New York is always awful.”

“Is it February?” His eyes sparkled with some recognition.

“Yes.”

“That means it’s Valentine’s Day. Do you have anybody?” he asked Frankie while she buttoned his coat.

Frankie found these moments of lucidity almost more unbearable than the elliptical nonsense. Grasping at his mention of Valentine’s Day would be just as desperate as celebrating his lifting his right hand.

“Yes, I do have someone,” she heard herself tell her father. “His name is Jil.”

“A man named Jill? Jill is a girl and Jack is a boy. Even I still know that.” Abraham smiled broadly.

Frankie kissed her father’s cheek. “Dad, you still know a lot.”

Walking with Frankie down Madison Avenue back to his apartment, Abraham stopped at a garbage can on the corner of Ninety-second Street, opened his fly, and started to pee. Frankie saw sixth-grade girls in their uniforms from Nightingale-Bamford pointing at him. Without hesitation, she stepped directly in front of Abraham as if they were having a casual conversation. All the while Frankie kept her eyes focused on the Madison Avenue street sign in order to give her father his privacy.

Frankie had arranged to meet Jil at his apartment for a drink prior to going on to Judy’s for dinner. Sitting in his forest green double-height living room overlooking Tavern on the Green, Frankie tucked her feet up in his signed Mies van der Rohe chair that had launched a million replicas.

“You look very sweet over there, like a young girl all cuddled up in a ball.” Jil affectionately patted her head as he passed her a vodka on the rocks.

“It’s so calm here.” Frankie sipped her drink.

“And you know, I did it all without feng shui.” Jil pronounced the word with a knowing disdain. “You seem a little sad tonight. Is everything all right?”

“Just a hard day.”

“I understand. Hippocratic oath and all that.” Jil smiled at her. “Even Charlie Acton won’t tell anyone who his patients are, although everyone knows they are the best-looking women in town. Well, I suppose that’s what I get for dating a doctor.”

Frankie quietly flinched whenever Jil mentioned that they were dating. It was fine for her to tell her father or even her girlfriends that she was seeing him. But Frankie still knew the difference between companionship and an affair. If they were really dating they’d have to be sleeping together, and as far as Frankie knew, they weren’t.

“Doctors are a disaster,” Frankie answered. “The last one I dated ran off with the sugar heiress.”

“I hear they’re miserable,” Jil tossed off.

“You did?” Frankie hadn’t heard about Jack and his sugar heiress since she saw pictures in Architectural Digest of their estate in Hawaii.

“No, I haven’t heard anything.” He came by the chair and kissed her on the lips. “Don’t be so sad. You have no idea what a glorious woman you are.”