Juliana turned to Gordon, who was staring at his cell phone.

“ … we aren’t conventional, I guess. We haven’t discussed it.”

“Bullshit, my dear,” Mr. Kechel said affably. “You don’t believe that yourself.”

“Believe what? That we aren’t conventional?”

“If you are to be married, you must be engaged. That is the convention.”

Then, with a wide smile: “Why don’t we look for one tomorrow? I’ll be staying over, you know. There must be a decent jewelry store in this hick town.”

Juliana laughed again, not certain what to think. Was Mr. Kechel serious? Gordon seemed scarcely to be listening.

“Do you like diamonds, my dear? Emeralds? Sapphires?”—it wasn’t clear if Norman Kechel was teasing.

Juliana had no idea how to reply. The rich man’s self-confidence was intimidating to her, unsettling.

Their table was booked in the hotel steak house for eight p.m., but Mr. Kechel was in no hurry to curtail the levity of the Mon ey Bar, where more patrons, mainly men, were entering, seating themselves at the bar, facing the glittering wall of bottles.

How like an altar, such a wall of bottles. Juliana had not so clearly noticed in the past.

Wishing she were alone, in the Mon ey Bar. So much easier in life, alone.

Most of the patrons of the Mon ey Bar were men of Mr. Kechel’s age, social class. They were possibly businessmen. Travelers. This was his kind of bar, Norman Kechel told Juliana—“Somewhere between classy and sleazy.” Overpriced, to keep out riffraff and frat boys. High-quality whiskey, scotch, bourbon. Impressive. Like the dour old Commodore Hotel, with fifteen-foot ceilings and cramped bathrooms, old-style bathtubs with dripping showers. Marble floors, antique chandeliers. The hotel was the real thing, even if nobody much wanted the real thing any longer.

“My room smells like somebody blew out his brains there. Not recently—nineteen twenty-nine.”

Juliana laughed, though the humor of this remark was lost upon her. Was nineteen twenty-nine the stock market crash? The start of the Great Depression? How old was Norman Kechel? She liked the man’s low-keyed, deadpan humor. He could be on late-night TV, muttering innuendos out of the corner of his mouth. Unlike his earnest son, he liked to drink and made no secret of it. Indeed, Norman Kechel was a drinker. Must have made his money as a younger man, when he took that sort of thing seriously, and now he was happiest in a dim-lit neon place like the Mon ey Bar, sipping a whiskey and chewing stale nuts that left his fingers covered in salt. In the long, horizontal mirror behind the bar his blunt face bobbed, as flushed and amorphous as an undersea life-form.

That the man was a drinker, Juliana understood. She knew Norman Kechel intuitively, from the inside. Yet it was crucial to her that Norman Kechel not quite guess how kindred the two of them were.

Counting each sip of the strawberry daiquiri. Calculating when she might plausibly order another.