Stanley went to the two o’clock meeting. No one else nightside did. He knew that day editors—if they thought of him at all—could not remember his name. Still, even among the always changing up-and-comers at the Washington Spectator there were editors with gentleness for any breathing soul; they were the ones who said, “Hello, how are you?” and looked at him with fellow feeling. Most others could not risk a greeting. He was dull as foot soles, a man with nothing to share about how to get where they were going. Unaccountably, Stanley felt for all of them, his tribe of avoiders. He saw even the marauding ambitionists were bashful. Lately, their anxiety was higher than usual: the managing editor had stepped aside to write a column; the competition to replace him had begun. His vying successors all attended the two o’clock. They played to Adam, the Spec’s executive editor.

Stanley thought this as he sat on the wall bench that ringed the conference room, never at the table. He possessed none of the appurtenances of power: slots, working reporters in those slots, stories by those reporters, space for those stories. In the daily debate over the front page, Stanley was rabble, not player.

Adam, last to arrive, took a seat. Stanley saw Martina Welk, the National editor, move her hair with the smallest jut of her shoulder. He was not sure if it was a crush, a bloodbath of unfinished father-need, or the actual article of falling and being felled by love, but Martina was subject to one of them—and Adam the cause. All this, and she wanted to be Managing Editor. She was interesting to look at, Stanley thought, with her knotted intensity of a face, not much to speak of in the way of eyebrows or eyelashes, long thin hair always ponytailed and gray, and those hands, such hands Martina had. Long fingers that ended in hard-driving nail-bitten slimness, knuckles and joints oversized compared with narrow digits, and all of it attached to wrists so see-through he felt sure if he got close enough he would be able to watch her pulse.