He took off her bra. Her tits—fell down. He tried to raise one up to normal height, where it had been in the bra, and then he tried the other. Bloop. Like deflated bags of water, hanging to the waistband of her undies, cold, the consistency of chunky soup. She looked at him, her sad eyes smiling, her sad mouth looking for its tongue, her sad tongue looking for a crack in her lower lip to lick.

What was this?

She asked him if he was nervous. He wasn’t nervous.

She examined and squeezed his behind. His hand slid across her stomach and felt soft, pillowy fat. And then she stepped back and lifted one leg and then the other, humming quietly, and he realized she was dancing.

She owned the one and only building he was building. Her father owned the other project Rich’s company was in the process of constructing, a $125 million deal about a mile from here involving forty subcontractors from around the country—a job so huge Rich had been relegated to underground utilities and landscaping. He wasn’t in any position to push her away. He could feel the vast inexperience of a woman of complete fragility, shielded by her wealth, with a lot of power, reacting to his withdrawal.

“I’m getting married in three days and you are disgusting” was what he wanted to say. “Haven’t you ever just goofed around a little? Why don’t you put your clothes back on?”

He had to get out of here because he had to be at the airport by eleven tonight so he could fly to France to get married on Saturday.

“My darling,” she said to him, and pulled his head to her chest.

A LITTLE LATER, he was caught in a kind of eternal now—an eternally present moment—adrift, but where? They were on the floor, she was mostly on the concrete, he was mostly in the dirt, trying to breathe through the top of his head.

How long could this go on? Had she ever orgasmed in her life?

The giblets were only palatable if you were horny and liked the person, he now had learned.

What was happening to him was, he observed, actually worse than any punishment he was going to get from Gynnie, if he told her, which he would; he’d have to. He saw now that there would be no good way to do it. He felt as if he’d been singled out for some kind of crystalline moral instruction. He tried to zone out; he pictured lying on a beach in Rio, reading a magazine, eating the same ripe plum over and over. He looked at his watch. In fifteen more minutes he would quit. He began rewriting this time of his existence into the untrue negative: “I never befriended Nora Garleck outside of work. I am not lying here now.”