Her voice seeped through the ding and buzz of Corey’s pinball machine, soft and dubious and placatory all at once. “Not really. I’m glad for you. You’ve worked so hard and this was like the final barrier—now you’re in—but is that really the way to conduct office hours? Isn’t it, I don’t know, unorthodox—to say the least?”

He’d stayed until the others had left, even the girlfriend and the Englishman (who kept glancing at his watch and finally at some point said, “Hey, Tim, I’m beat—see you back at the house, okay?” and Tim had said, “Take Brenda with you, will you?” and Brenda had puffed out her lips and Tim gave her a look and said, “Wait up for me, baby, I won’t be long. Promise”).

They sat in silence, both of them half-looped, or at least Fitz was, and listened to the footsteps recede down the hallway. The light on the desk held steady. Tim stretched, cracked his knuckles. He picked up his glass, set it down again, let out a sigh. “My guess is you’re here to talk about your initiation the other night, your experience—am I right?”

“It was everything you said.”

“No bumps in the road?”

“Not really. I mean, Joanie and I—”

Tim lifted a finger to his lips as if to hush him. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “That’s something, isn’t it? Really, God is in the fucking, isn’t that right? You’ve never had sex like that before? Pure magic, right?”

He nodded.

“How long you been married?”

“Thirteen years.”

The figure floated there a moment and he couldn’t tell from the look on Tim’s face whether he felt that was just a blip in history or a life sentence, whether he was jealous or maybe regretful over the way his own marriage had ended or simply relieved to be free all over again to have women like Brenda in his life. He began to feel uneasy. Should he have fudged it? Should he have said six? Or what, twenty? Of course the former would have abridged Corey and the latter would have made him a child groom. Not so long—he could have said Not so long—but then the truth was he’d been married for more than a third of his life.

Tim leaned forward to take up the pack of cigarettes on his desk, extract two and pass one to Fitz, who put it between his lips, though he didn’t really feel like a smoke and was trying to cut back, if only to save money. “You look starry-eyed, Fitz,” Tim said, producing a lighter and leaning forward to touch the flame first to Fitz’s cigarette and then his own.