As August advanced the nights held a foretaste of winter and he began to leave the house afternoons with a fire laid in the range and a lined overcoat folded on the backseat of the motorcar. He bought hay from the sheep farmer Flood and ordered oats and stacked the sacks in the granary of tight-joined oaken planks. Nights, fires were lit in the public rooms of the Sinclair, one in the bar as well, and the vacationers would cluster in their summer clothes and Jamie raised his bartenders’ pay by a dime an hour simply because they had to make the same remarks about the weather over and over. The guests were all on summer holiday but the season had turned and the hotel workers felt it and it laid an edge to them. Jamie sat in his office or sometimes perched on a stool at the bar sipping ginger ale and for the first time could see how this worked—the quickening of tempers and emotions, the sudden quittings, the ends of love affairs or the beginnings of new and unlikely ones, the workers slightly slower in response to the guests, the afterhours parties more tainted with futility and so bearing harder upon the partygoers so more waiters and laundresses and liverymen and kitchen scrubs and bellboys showed up later in the mornings or if on time more hungover or both. For him, all it did was make him sad.

He brought girls home with him. In between times, it didn’t seem very often but when one was there with him there would always come a time, usually before he roused to drive her back to where she needed to be but a couple of times when he woke in the morning and found her there beside him, he felt like it was just one after the other with a different suit of clothes to take off and high or low breasts and waists wide or slender and different teeth and cries coming out of them or not. And with each he was tender and murderous, wanting while he lay with them nothing but their pleasure and caring nothing for his own but once both were done, once both had taken it as far as it might go he wanted them only gone. He would rise up at four in the morning—when all he wanted was sleep—and make coffee and carry it in to the bed and nurse her from sleep and approve of her sitting up and sipping at the coffee, her face puffed and tender, the sheets and blankets pooled in her lap as she sat, his mind already out the door cranking the Ford.

He woke from dreams of Joey leaving him where he would sob and beg, clinging to her, debasing himself. Would come awake in breathless agony—the look, touch, feel and sound of her fading away. Some days a dream-image would return brilliantly later in the day and he would stop what he was doing to bend double as from a cramp in the middle of him.