He spent the morning after she left cleaning up the kitchen and washing the big pot with burned zucchini in it. Janet had made him three quarts of zucchini soup before leaving on the shuttle, along with two jars of chutney, veal stew in a blue casserole dish, and two loaves of Irish soda bread. It was very international. The mess in the tiny kitchen of her apartment took him two hours to clean up. Then he cooked himself a breakfast of scrambled eggs and last night’s mashed potatoes, fried with onions. He drank two cups of coffee from Janet’s Chemex. Drinking the coffee, he walked several times into the living room where his easel stood and looked at the quarter-done painting. Each time he looked at it his heart sank. He did not want to finish the painting—not that painting, that dumb, academic abstraction. But there was no other painting for him to paint right now. What he wanted was Janet.

Janet was a very successful folk art dealer. They had met at a museum party. She was in Washington now as a consultant to the National Gallery. She had said to him, “No, I don’t think you should come to Washington with me. We need to be apart from each other for a while. I’m beginning to feel suffocated.” He had nodded sagely while his heart sank.

One problem was that he distrusted folk art and Janet’s interest in it, the way he distrusted Janet’s fondness for her cats. Janet talked to her cats a lot. He was neutral about cats themselves, but he felt people who talked to them were trivial. And being interested in badly painted nineteenth-century portraits also seemed trivial to him now.

He looked at the two gold-framed American primitives above Janet’s sofa, said, “Horseshit!” and drew back his mug in a fantasy of throwing coffee on them both.

Across from the apartment, on Sixty-third Street, workmen were renovating an old mansion; they had been at it three months before, when Harold had moved in. He watched them for a minute now, mixing cement in a wheelbarrow, and bringing sacks of it from a truck at the corner of Madison Avenue. Three workmen in white undershirts held sunlit discourse on the plywood ramp that had replaced the building’s front steps. Behind windows devoid of glass he could see men moving back and forth. But nothing happened; nothing seemed to change in the building. It was the same mess it had been before, like his own spiritual growth: lots of noise and movement and no change.

He looked at his watch, relieved. It was ten-thirty. The morning was half over and he needed to go to the bank. He put on a light jacket and left.

As he was waiting in a crowd at the Third Avenue light he heard a voice shout “Taxi!” and a man pushed roughly past him, right arm high and waving, onto the avenue. The man was about thirty, in faded blue jeans and a sleeveless sweater. A taxi squealed to a stop at the corner and the man conferred with the driver for a moment before getting in. He seemed to be quietly arrogant, preoccupied with something. Harold could have kicked him in the ass. He did not like the man’s look of confidence. He did not like his sandy, uncombed hair.