Next thing you know these two will be going out dancing.

Blumenthal has one final good-bye line: “And really, I appreciate your help, both of you. Like I said, we’ll stay in touch. My cafeteria door is always open.”

The three of us laugh softly, then exchange another quiet round of thank-yous.

As we walk to the exit of the cafeteria-office, Sarkar asks, “Are you going home now?”

“Yeah. If I don’t go home, I may just fall asleep standing up right here.”

“Let me give you a ride to your house,” he says.

“No way. You live all the way on the Upper East Side, and I’m out in Brooklyn,” I say. “Plus, you look like a guy who’s just completed a marathon.”

The fact is I just want to be alone, to get one of those end seats on the train, to listen to my music mix.

“I insist,” Sarkar says.

A series of “No, really,” followed by a series of “I insist, really,” eventually ends with Sarkar saying, “Okay, meet you in ten minutes in the doctors’ parking lot. Look for a handsome man driving a blue Lexus.”

“I’ll just look for a blue Lexus. That’ll be enough,” I say.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

HERE’S THE THING ABOUT modern luxury cars: When you see the commercials, the cars look really stupid and cheesy. And the commercials themselves are really annoying. They all look like they could have been shown on television in 1970. But once you get inside one of those luxury cars—the big seats, the complicated control system, the absolute quiet—you wonder how you can ever get back inside your 2008 Hyundai again.

Sarkar’s Lexus has something called an ignition fob. To me it looks like a small remote control for a television, but as soon as he touches that fob, the big blue Lexus starts purring like…well, like a big blue Lexus is supposed to purr.

“The best way to get to my place is to take—” I start to say.

“Yes, I know,” he says with a smile.

“Sorry,” I say. “Not everybody knows how to get out of Manhattan and into Brooklyn. Or if they do know, they usually don’t know how to get to Crown Heights.”

“I only know Brooklyn because of two events,” he says. “The first event is the invention of the GPS system, so I rarely get lost. The second event is my divorce.”

“Uh, okay,” I say. “The GPS I get. On the other thing, the divorce, well, would you like to explain what you mean by ‘the second event is my divorce’?”

He laughs. “Of course. Obviously I was trying to be provocative,” he says. “Instead I ended up just being confusing. And possibly quite irritating.” Then he turns a bit more somber. He talks as if he is almost telling a story about someone else, not him.