The heater was up full, roaring against the windshield. Sweating, he turned it down, and when he tried to shrug out of his overcoat she was busy lighting her cigarette and didn’t even make a pretense of trying to help him. “Keep your hands on the wheel, will you?” she snapped in an irritable little buzz of a voice that brought his anger right back up again. He was going to say, It’s not just a couple of hours, but the thought came like a punch in the stomach, and her whole attitude—and the fact that they were late—made him go on the attack instead. “Screw you,” he said. “Really, screw you.”

The upshot was that when they finally came up the front steps of Tim’s house (after the added tension of driving around the same block three times, squinting at numbers on dimly lit mailboxes), they were angry, pissed off, stewing, in exactly the wrong mood for the session he’d let himself get talked into, which he, in turn, had talked her into. And if that wasn’t enough she’d insisted on bringing along a bottle of Bordeaux they couldn’t afford, as if this were a suburban dinner party with the local minister and the superintendent of schools and the guy who owned the car dealership. He felt ridiculous, the vise tightening one more twist in the fraught moment he found himself standing there in a sudden blast of wind, cradling the wine and pushing the doorbell nobody was answering.

“You always bring wine,” Joanie said, her voice flat and instructional. She’d spent half an hour on her hair and makeup and she was wearing her best dress, her best coat and a pair of black pumps that were new last fall. “It’s expected. It’s civilized. And you hand it to the wife, not him—”

“Hand it to whose wife?”

“Your prof’s—Tim.”

“His wife’s dead.”

“What are you talking about—I thought you said he had kids?”

“You don’t need a wife to have kids, not once they’re born. She killed herself is what I hear, I don’t know, before he even came here . . . Out west. In California.”

The wind was bitter, riding a dank undercurrent of moisture off the sea, and he shivered in his blazer, cursing himself for leaving his overcoat in the car. He pressed the buzzer again. From inside came a low murmur of voices rising and falling in conversation, a snatch of laughter, the low-end repetitive thump of the bass line of a jazz record, and that was a surprise—he didn’t know Tim was a jazz buff; he would have figured him for Bach, Handel, Mozart, maybe Shostakovich if he really got adventurous.

“Still,” Joanie said, because she always had to get the last word in, “you don’t come empty-handed to somebody’s house.”