As he read aloud, he kept remembering that it was his unhappy sister’s boss, a self-important thug in a double-breasted camel-hair topcoat, who had reluctantly filled in the young author with details of how labor unions operated. At the time, Bech thought he could, in the long future before him, assemble all America as a mosaic of such research. Now these details, as they passed through the microphone into the air, seemed worked-up and tinny, and his antihero Klein’s cynical take on the Trappists—misfits, defectives, cop-outs—adolescently callous. With relief he at last ended the reading; but there were still the questions from the audience to face. Do you use a word processor and, if so, what kind? What authors influenced you in your youth? Why did they never make a movie of Travel Light? It would have been great with Sal Mineo. What—his least favorite question—is your personal favorite of your books? The auditorium lights had been turned up, so he could see the waving hands, the eager respectful aggressive faces. He scanned them for Alice, and failed to spot her, but the crowd was large, with restless, ill-lit edges over by the walls, and there was nothing about her, not even the magenta suit, to keep her from blending in.

Dawn had brought them into gauntly irrigated land yielding, mile by mile, to desert. He had scuttled out of her roomette like a gopher, and snatched a few hours of sleep in his own. The Pullman car had an ecology they were fitting into. The other passengers accepted them, by now, as a couple. They were invited again to play bridge—Bech timidly failed to bid a small slam though Alice had given clear signals that her hand was loaded—and a beefy pair of middle-aged Iowans sat down at their table for dinner, not appearing to notice that the other couple was too groggy to make small talk and conversationally lacked a common past to draw upon. At some ten-minute stop, where the Spanish adobe architecture squatted as if stunned under a sky full of vaporous thunderheads, Bech ran off the train to find a drugstore and replenish his supply of Trojans. He saw nothing near the station but pottery and buckskin souvenirs of the West, and heard the conductor call “All aboard.” The train had become a conscience to him, a home he hurried back to in a panic that, huge as the thing was, it would disappear.

“That’s all right,” Alice said that night, of his Trojan failure. “I wouldn’t mind having a baby of yours.”

“But—” he began, thinking of her unsuspecting husband. Tad. The name suggested an insecure glad-hander, with an affected clipped accent.