‘You want Ella to hear this?’ she had asked, when Larry, still fogged with the drink and drugs he had consumed at T. Bone’s, began to raise his voice. Hands on hips, a cartoon of the shrewish wife, she demanded to know what he had been doing in LA, and when she seemed, quite rightly, not to believe his heavily edited version of how he had spent the previous twelve hours, he had almost choked on his indignation. Her own life offered him little in the way of material for reproaches (he had come to think of this as a form of meanness) and, for lack of anything intelligent to say, anything pertinent, he accused her of carrying on with her guru, her Jap, Mr Transience, and for this, quite rightly, she had flung the remains of her OJ at him and walked out, pausing at the door to hiss: ‘I used to admire you.’

What was depressing was how quickly they could reach this stage, as if each had become specifically what the other could not tolerate, though on the following day he had apologized – a mute, somewhat cowardly apology – buying her a jar of her favourite black olives from Molinari’s on Columbus Avenue. He had left them on the breakfast bar and then spied on her from the hall as she fished them out of the oil with her fingers. It was the moment he might have gone to her – there were only three good steps between them – the moment he might have settled his hands on her shoulders and said the necessary things. But distances in a marriage – in his at least – were deceptive, and he had remained by the door, perverse and voyeuristic, watching his wife eat olives and slick her cheeks with grease when she pushed away a tear.

Someone tried the door again. ‘Later!’ called Larry. He was busy with the contents of his wash bag, turning them out on to the narrow steel shelf by the basin. Safety razor, multivitamins, deodorant, painkillers. Two spare canisters for Ella’s inhaler. A smoke-brown plastic bottle of Deroxat; five foil sheets of Xanax; a bottle of Luvox, a box of Paxil, a condom, nail-clippers, toothbrush, eye-drops, tweezers. He swallowed a Xanax and a Deroxat, and cleaned his teeth, then blew his nose, noting that his snot was streaked with blood from a last big line of adulterated powder woofed up from a CD cover in the spare room while Kirsty and Ella had waited outside in the Cherokee.