“Mr. van der Holt, I’m so sorry for calling back. But your father’s just said that he wants very much for you to visit at Christmas.”

He put the receiver down and ran back to Mary-Sue at the door: “And what do I get out of this?”

“Well, let’s see, a momentary sense of goodwill? Free cocoa?”

Raymond was back inside and on the phone. “Look, tell my father I’ve got a professional engagement at Christmas. I’ll see him later.”

He hung up the phone hastily and returned to Mary-Sue with a slight shortness of breath. He stretched out his hand to her: “I’m all yours.”

Raymond cherished the colorful stacks of toilet reading that showed up at his door near the end of each year. It was marvelous how marketers located his home address and worked out his weaknesses—monogrammed linen stationery, shawl-collar cashmere robes and an endless onslaught of shearling slides and alpaca scarves. The art museum catalogs had modernist scarves from Japan that looked like ghost scarves, the ethereal remains of silk scarves that had died and gone to scarf heaven. And fleece everything—how he loved the smiling sound of “fleece.”

He was especially grateful for the catalogs this year because they distracted him from a particular MoMA greeting card that had arrived that afternoon, a minimalist black triangle standing in for a Christmas tree. It was signed: You Know Who.

Who the hell was You Know Who?

Dear RvdH,

You know what.

You know why.

You know when.

X,

You Know Who

Raymond stared at the black triangle. He inverted it. Now it was some modernist pubis, like Miro’s version of what that naked girl slapped against his window.