Still, she did not look away from the window. Outside, pigeons broke from the street and rose in cooing, hectic swirlings. They wheeled in the impossible light and Ethan felt the urge to raise his camera to the sky, to reach and lift it from where it hung around his neck, but of course it was not there.

“I think my wife is going to leave me,” he said.

He saw Mallory blink once, very hard. He saw when she opened her eyes that they were not wet.

“Well, golly. You must feel pretty bad,” she said.

Ethan realized that his glass was empty. He lifted it anyway.

“I feel like whatever I feel now is going to get worse.”

She reached up with her right hand and touched one of her earrings. They were crystal baubles, Viking replicas, and were, as far as he knew, the only earrings she owned. They sold them uptown, at the Cloisters, the Medieval art museum where she worked and where she met Ethan when he came there to do a brochure shoot.

“You never told me her name,” Mallory said. “Not once. And it’s too bad because I like names.”

“Samantha,” he said, and tipped the ice from his glass into his mouth. It made a sound like teeth cracking as he bit it. Samantha. He tried to imagine her now. Samantha slinking through the city with her head down and her shoulders rounded, her arms crossed in front of her body, hugging her chest like a little girl walking home in the rain; or Samantha slouching over a bar, tossing her hair out of her face as she looked up toward the ceiling at the frail benediction of the lights there and smiled for a moment for nobody at all; Samantha stepping out of a cab and into some man’s apartment building, winking at the doorman and disappearing behind a closing door of smoked glass. Samantha, after a year of marriage, a cipher still; Samantha whom he knew he could still love, but wouldn’t; Samantha, now, certainly, inevitably, anything but alone.

The year’s jealousy flared in his chest like a lit match. He wanted another drink but there was no server and he was sure that if he went downstairs to the bar Mallory would be gone by the time he came back. The curtain behind the stage slid open and a man in a tuxedo stepped into the spotlight. He was short, a dwarf, and perhaps because Ethan and Mallory were the only ones in the bar he angled his body out of the direct light and looked up toward their table. Under the slanting spot-glow, his black mustache seemed to droop away from his lip like paint smeared into an elongated frown. He began to sing.

“I tried to take her picture today,” Ethan said. “As she left the apartment. I don’t know why I did that.”