“Have you been watching television?” he asked. She flapped around, only with less strength. This was utterly nonsensical. Television? He rushed to fill the shortest of silences, saying, “No. Of course not. That was dumb of me.”

It wasn’t as dumb as she. She thought again—Don told her; on television. She looked around her study for the remote. There, it was on the floor. She picked it up. CNN lit the room, muted. Headline News was on sports. No help there.

“It’s all over television,” Jonathan Strasser said. He sounded excited. Was he panting? “It’s—well, I guess I’m to blame, because I went to the other paper, I was frustrated, Don kept saying he would use it, early, you know, before the book, and then, when he didn’t, and I felt I had no options, and I went to him, and he said, It’s your decision, I would like it if you didn’t, it’s not part of our agreement—we never had an agreement. He only mentioned an ‘agreement’ when I was dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied, that’s too strong, when I was worried. Worried that it was just not soon enough. I learned, I talked to some people, his book is not on any fast track, and then I heard from some friends of mine at OMB that he might have finagled sitting in on principals meetings, a rumor, nothing more, and I thought, My God, and what I said to my wife, I said, ‘This thing has gone on too long,’ and today, today, when it finally got moving, it was not at all what I expected.”

Mabel switched channels on the remote. Soap operas, cooking class, This Old House—there, there it was. It had gone beyond CNN. It was on one channel. It was on the next channel. And the next. She didn’t even bother to turn up the sound.

It was the Sissy report. The report her white-browed former secretary of state had opined about—the report she had casually wanted and forgotten about since. But Strasser had not been at that dinner party. He had come to another dinner party, a later party. With quavering clarity, she saw the scene anew: she was by the bookcases, and she had tried to understand Strasser’s fondling of the agricultural-policy book, only gradually understanding it was his daughter’s, not his wife’s, and Don had come, and his mouth—something looked funny about her husband’s way of talking.

Don’s mouth, she remembered now. She had taken it for a new awkwardness. But it was something else altogether. Don had been grateful. And Jonathan Strasser was the object of his obeisance.

“So you’re looking for Don,” Mabel said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a message, because he’s up on the Hill.” Her talking was problematic, but now its clotting had nothing to do with play-acting.