“Your family,” Gynnie said. “Your mother.”

“Is everyone having a nice time?” A pause in communication, a weird gap of overseas static. He waited for something else.

Gynnie wondered if Rich really wanted to know. She could see everything, exposed, as though for the first time, a system functioning with all of its absurdities. Not so much like “the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about,” as she’d said in the past, in the middle of a less threatening crisis, but like a planet, turning, with all its immense, fantastic permanence and emanation. No wonder you’re still so fucked up, she thought, and then just said it, “No wonder you’re still so fucked up,” and felt much better.

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you call her Mommy? What’s with everybody sitting on everybody’s lap? What’s with everybody going to the bathroom in pairs?”

“We don’t want the other people to be lonely.”

“They talk about farts. They talk about house pets.”

“Yeah?”

“They smoke.”

He didn’t say anything. She giggled uncomfortably. “Your mother wants to say hello.”

Rich’s mother reminded him to pack the expensive hairbrush she’d sent him in the little purple velvet bag with the silver drawstring and his initials monogrammed on it. He didn’t see what the problem was in this innocent conversation, or in anything else she’d ever done. His mother had bent over backward for him all his life. In fact, he’d thrown the brush away when he got it—he didn’t use a hairbrush, and the sight of it, of its daintiness, made him feel like he was being asphyxiated. He said he would go find the brush as soon as he hung up. He was dying to tell his mother about the nightmare with Nora but didn’t know how. There wasn’t time. His mother was not his confidante anymore.

EARLY THAT NEXT morning, in a farming town in the shadow of a nuclear reactor in the southern part of France, Emile Marcus tried to buy a sandwich for the long ride to the wedding in Cravat. He’d had a small piece of his throat and some of the tissue in his sinuses removed, along with a part of his upper lip—not much—and the scar that ran from his right nostril down to his collarbone had healed months earlier, but still, sometimes, he felt it impeded his speech so that he wasn’t being clearly understood. He spoke to a mustached teenage boy behind the case with the face of a cartoon baby; the boy winced sullenly. As Emile repeated himself, two young women asked for the very same sandwiches and were served. He spoke a third time; another patron appeared to his left. Emile was staring at the cutting board covered with lettuce, brie, sliced hard-boiled egg. Is this a joke? he asked himself.