“Good, good,” I mumbled and turned to watch the winds making small waves on the river and the illusion created by the turning of the Earth on which we ride that it’s the sun that’s moving, to the west and sinking, on its way to hiding below the horizon.

She was a reasonably attractive woman, as these things go, and had probably been an almost beautiful one ten or twenty years earlier. What the hell was her name? And where exactly did I know her from? I guessed her to be staring at forty and hoping it wasn’t staring back at her. Well dressed. Expensively dressed to the degree that I could judge. The manner with which she raised her glass and put her lips to it was trying very hard to say I’m just sipping at this for the flavor and because it’s refreshingly cool. She was good at it, having practiced it a lot I guessed, and it was convincing if you didn’t put an odometer on the speed with which it went down, which told another story, that her natural state was a place she wanted to leave behind and the 80 proof was rolling her away from it as surely as the steel wheels on the steel rails below us. She said this and that, I was listening just enough to make polite noises and I don’t recall what. If I’d had computer in front of me or even a bunch of paper or a serious looking book, I would have said “Pardon me, I don’t mean to be rude, I’d love to chat, but I have to get this done.” Instead I just hoped I could keep her nattering at a sufficient psychological distance that it wouldn’t build to the point where I blurted out a strident command to shut up.

Madelaine, that was her name. Maddie.

Right, right, she was going on about a son-of-a-bitch husband who was ruining her, cheating, of course, with secretaries and what not, of course, the nanny, that ex-nanny, two nannies back, maybe the housekeeper even if she had fat thighs, alienating her children from her, Leslie and Sandra.

They had a lot of money. Or he had a lot of money. Maybe not by New York City standards, hedge fund billions and such. Certainly, by upstate standards. Maybe millions? This was from vague, passing gossip, about people I barely knew, from people I slightly knew and didn’t listen to very much. There was money there and there was little or no money here—meaning with me—and I felt its tug. I don’t know when it happened or if it was always that way and I was just blind to it, money has gravitational force. The bigger the mass of it, the closer you get to it, the more it pulls you.