‘You’d have found out yourself, in short order.’

‘Yes, but maybe not in time.’

‘Well, I’m glad I was able to put this glamorous proposition in perspective. One comment, if you’ll allow me to make it, is that goods are always available – all the kitchenware, clock radios, bed linens, TV sets, coffeemakers … Commodities all the way to the horizon. There’s enough of everything for everybody. That’s how productive and rich the social order is. The whole process began with the proposition that the conquest of nature was going to be the top job of the modern age …’

Listening, Amy gradually lowered her head, as if to be particularly attentive – or perhaps to let me have my way, to wait me out. I had always said such things. When we were younger, Amy used to say, ‘Here we go again.’ I think she disliked – at times positively hated – such remarks about the social order or the modern age. They reduced her to a lower mental rank. When I aired my deeper views, she waited me out. She made allowance for this minor vice. These observations seemed worth making, and against my better judgment I made them. Occasionally I couldn’t resist trying them out at the dinner table.

‘Jay picked up this habit from you, Harry,’ she had once complained. ‘In our Northside days, when we were first married. And especially when he was playing Bartók LPs, he’d get his ass up against the chimneypiece and put his elbows on the mantel and start quoting his T. S. Eliot to me. And as you know, I’m not one of those women who are born to be deep. There never has been anything metaphysical about me. I have a high-average IQ, that’s all.’

But now the diggers were signaling to the fellow who operated the hoist, and his rig approached closer to the edge of the grave.

‘I think they’re about to begin,’ I said.

‘I was expecting it to take a lot more time.’

‘Jay hasn’t been here long. Not in cemetery terms. The soil hasn’t had time to harden.’

The tractor tires were printing their treads in the fresh brown dirt. A sort of bay leaf pattern. The smooth little machine stopped in a heap of dark-brown grave soil, and the driver came down and chocked the wheels. Canvas bands were clipped to the coffin, and the hoist was attached. The man who bent to do this was unusually long in the spine. He proved to be short-legged as well. When he stepped back and straightened himself, he wasn’t all that tall. The engine started, and the blue-gray coffin tilted from the gravel. The workers straightened it as it rose, dribbling dirt. Unwanted pictures of what was inside went through my head: the body dressed in its business suit, the handsome symmetrical face – cyanotic, chlorotic, livid. Perhaps a forgotten pencil in a pocket. Maybe the shoes were laced, even knotted. Perhaps the dead man had an erection.