Because if Greg Tampico is not behind the room divider, it means Vicky was right; it means Greg Tampico gave you the aardvark to get you to feel what you are feeling (love); to get you to realize that a public life in the private sector with Greg Tampico is a far, far better prospect than a private life in the public sector without Greg Tampico, and seriously now, like, all you need is for Greg Tampico to come up behind you, place his hands over your eyes and say what he said after you fled his apartment, that which you overheard on the stairwell through his weeping: “You’re so blind, you’re so fucking blind,” and while you thought at the time that he was talking to himself, cursing himself, you understand now that he was cursing you, and Alex Wilson, it is true, you have been so fucking blind.

You walk over to the partition, grab the handles, and the whole wall accordions open.

* * *

Thin Titus Downing returns from The Green Otter politely drunk off one beer, arms loaded with victuals, as the arc of sun crosses each of the twelve heads of deer buck like the hands of a priest. The lines are gone, no one peers into his windows. Outside, only the theater troupe remains.

The boys, beginning to feel the first waves of their hangovers, are collapsed on Downing’s front stoop, and their throats are parched, their faces sunburned and weary. They are waiting for Downing to return so he will pay them and they can stay drunk. Their knees are dirty, their arms link, they’ve long lost their claws, but their heads, still donning papier-mâché pig noses, sway slightly as they hiccup through sloppy, sober harmonics, “Phyllis is (hic) my only (hic) joy,” and so this is the tune that Downing is absentmindedly whistling as he amiably walks through them and enters his shop, where noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, his old roommate, is waiting.

“My friend,” Downing says. “How’d we do.”

Skinner’s neatly clipped handlebar is flat, soaked in sweat. “Well, I did sell it,” he says.

“For how much?” Downing asks.

“Not much, I’m afraid. A German bought it.”

“A German?” says Downing, and he looks longingly at the table where the aardvark was stationed but now is gone.

He collapses into the chair where Rebecca Ostlet sat and listens in a daze as Skinner tells him how she was there the whole time, how there were no other women who entered the shop because the boys drove them off. How people didn’t stay long—but it was only because it was so frightfully hot out, Skinner says, so Downing should not feel badly.

And Skinner explains, very gently, how the Gentlemen couldn’t see the value in the aardvark, but Walter Potter, who would know, loved it. Called it a masterpiece.

“It is a masterpiece,” says Titus Downing.

“There’s more,” Skinner says, and goes on to tell Titus Downing about the dogs: how Lady Ostlet, Mr. Potter and Mr. Skinner had all followed the Brontës upstairs to his private bedroom and found—what they found. And though Harold Skinner knows Downing perhaps better than most, he reminds him, as he spent two years living with him in a small room at Oxford and is entirely aware of the “preference” of Titus Downing, aware what little interest Downing ever showed in female courtship, the sight of a naked blind man in Titus Downing’s canopied bed did shock him, he admits.