Cover

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Title Page

Dedication

For Joy Harris and in memory of Shirley Hazzard

Epigraph

For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer.

—Warren Zevon

desk

On the fourth floor of a warehouse under the long stretch of the Green Line as it heads west out of the Loop, Cate prowls across a vast plain of old office desks. A walk through the decades of the previous century. She travels from linoleum to fake wood to real wood to scarred metal. She is looking for a particular desk. The play—At Ease—for which she is designing the sets, takes place in the late 1950s, on a military base in Georgia. She needs a metal desk, olive drab if possible. She has found two possibilities, but one is too small and one is tan. This will be the desk of the closeted drill sergeant. She decides to go with the larger one and spray-paint it at her shop. She snaps a couple of pictures, measures it with her tape, then pencils these dimensions into sketches of the play’s two sets. In the second set, the desk will be covered with a mattress and used as a bed.

Her cell makes the sound of a coin dropping into an old pay phone, a notification sound Maureen put on Cate’s phone so she’d know it was Maureen calling. Maureen’s photo appears on the screen, to the side of a text dialog box. The picture was taken on one of their early dates, a couple of months back now. Maureen is in a theater seat, leaning sideways to fit in the frame. Looking terrific in an effervescent way.

what’s up?

Cate never knows how to reply to this vague sort of question.

looking for a desk

can I see you tonight?

going to neale’s yoga class

ok. so, tomorrow then. already excited.

Advances in communication technology have made Cate’s life so much smoother. She is bad at phone calls, especially bad at making them, possibly interrupting someone in the middle of something more important. She hates hearing that small adjustment in someone’s voice. Now she almost never has to hear it. Probably the best phone calls of her life were the vintage ones, the hours she and Neale spent on the phone late at night as teenagers, luxurious conversations, artifacts of an earlier civilization. Also artifacts of who she and Neale used to be when they were trying to assemble the universe.