Its face was vast, the color of cartoon cheese. She went to its throat, then down its body to its hands, stacked one on the other; she touched a colossal thumb and felt the familiar consolation of papier-mâché. Its gray dress—habit? Cloak? What did you call the robes of a giant puppet?—lay flat on the ground as though bodiless. But it wasn’t bodiless. From beneath the hem came a human man, tall and skeletal, Bakelite-eyed, exactly the sort of mortal a puppet might give birth to. His head was triangular, wide at the temples and narrow at the chin; his hair was dark marcel. He looked at her. She thought, I might be the first woman he’s ever met. The expression on his face suggested this was possibly so. A puppeteer, she thought. Yes. Why not?

Really Jack had renounced puppetry years ago, as a teenager. Tonight he was a mere volunteer who’d carried the puppet’s train so that it wouldn’t trail in the street. Still, many a man has improved because of mistaken identity. Been ruined, too.

She said, “I love puppets.” In the bitter cold, her words turned white and lacey and lingered like doilies in the air. That was a form of ventriloquism, too.

“You don’t,” he said. “You fucking hate puppets.”

He knew everything about her already, it seemed.

Later he would understand that love was a spotlight that had allowed him to perform, but at the moment it felt as though he’d become his true self: not a better person, but funnier and meaner. For now they headed to a bar down the street. The establishment had on its side a sign that said EATING DRINKING PIANO, though inside there was no piano and no food. He wasn’t a puppeteer. He was a sort of Englishman, sort of American, who’d just gotten back from three years living in Exeter.

“Exeter, New Hampshire?” Sadie asked.

“Exeter, UK,” he said. “What’s Sadie short for?”

“Sadness,” she answered.

The bar was a dream of a bar, ill lit and long, with people in all the wooden booths. A precarity: it hung over the Mass Pike like a small-town rock formation—a stony profile, a balancing boulder—something that must be preserved at all costs. No dancing allowed. Any sudden movement might knock the bar into the turnpike. No jukebox. Never a band. In the ladies’ room, you could pay a dime, press a plunger, and get misted with perfume.

“Bar stool?” he said, their first negotiation, but bar stools were made for long, lean fellows like him, not for women as short and squat as she. The bar stools were red-topped and trimmed with ribbed chrome.

“Let’s see,” she answered.

He gave her his hand. “Allow me.”