He banished the card and photo to the corner of the living room where his grotesque Pop art monographs lived. He had his father’s winter blues. As repellent as it was to him to face up to the sly workings of DNA, this fact sealed their connection. He had for years spent December and January indoors, in a flannel robe thrown over silk pajamas. Every man in their family handed his melancholy down like some pauper’s heirloom. The blues was his link to his cousin, Gus, who sat in a Sioux City jail for shooting a co-worker in the ass when he misplaced his lunch pail; it linked him also to his paternal grandfather, a lapsed Klansman, who on his deathbed had requested sex with “Hebrew Sally,” a girl from his youth. He had the blues in his blood. While researching one of his books, he’d come across a reference to the blues in the Getica, the sixth-century text that chronicled the diaspora of the Gothic tribes. The author, Jordanes, wrote that on the isle of Scandza, or what would become modern Scandinavia, people went through a schizoid cycle of joy and sorrow with the continual light of midsummer and the interminable darkness of winter, and were “like no other race in their sufferings and blessings.” His winter blues was not a faddish new ailment, like ADD, carpal tunnel or Tourette’s. Why fight history?

He drank his Scotch and picked up The Waning of the Middle Ages, which was gathering dust on the coffee table. He’d underlined a passage years ago about how everybody in the Middle Ages was perpetually high-strung: So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.

And where was his houseghost during this time of need? He’d disengaged his alarm system specially for her. But no, she was spurning him. What did he have to do to bring her back? Beg? Cry? Strip? He’d do all three.

“I’m vulnerable right now,” he bellowed into the emptiness. “Come get me!” The ice-maker rumbled and plopped out some consolatory frozen phalanxes.

He undressed and lay supine on the sofa. He clicked on the remote and found the show called Desperate Housewives, which the critics said used to be funny, or good, or popular—he couldn’t remember which—and fell asleep.

Quellie Soo had been showing up often, and the girls heard her anxiously repeat the word staging as a noun, which repulsed them. One morning, a furniture rental truck dropped off two antique side tables, three frilly lamps and a bordello-style chaise lounge with red chenille fabric. Quellie and Mrs. Park spent the day dragging these pieces of alien furniture around the house until every room felt strange.