“It’s this way,” said Sadie. “If we aren’t sitting down. We could sit down.”

“We aren’t.”

“Aren’t we?” said Samuel Beckett. “Perhaps all my life what I wanted was a woman who’d sit on a curb with me.”

They walked for what seemed like hours, turning corners and doubling back, through the numbered alleys and alphabetical streets of the Back Bay. With every step Sadie’s feet rang in the cold like a slammed gate. “Where are we?” she asked and Samuel Beckett pointed and said, “Exeter.”

It was possible, thought Jack, that they had walked to Exeter, where he’d worked in a theater box office and rented a room from a theatrical couple—not theatrical in the sense of working in the theater but in the sense of: she was twenty years older with a blond crew cut, smelled of burnt roses, and he wore a pince-nez and sewed all of their gaudy extraordinary clothing, pin-tucked and double-breasted and circus-striped. He’d loved both of them, was disquieted by their adoration of each other, an equation he could never quite solve.

But the Exeter in question was a cinema, the marquee said so; the cinema was named after the street. The doors opened, and costumed people walked into the night. A tall man with drawn-on eyebrows pulled a blue feather boa tight around his neck. A platform-shoed and corseted person in a sequined jacket and majorette shorts squared a top hat over ears; you could divine nothing of the person at the center of all the makeup and sequins except a sort of weary bliss. Around them, more people in sequins and tulle, lipstick and lamé. Their appearance struck Jack like the revelation at night of some kind of luminescent animal, jellyfish or firefly: a single instance would be uncanny, but the whole group made you accept the miracle and think of holy things.

“What is happening?” said Sadie.

“Midnight movie,” said Samuel Beckett, turning into an alley.

“We’ve been down this alley,” said Jack.

“There’s a bar.”

“Bars are closed.”

“We can knock on the door. They’ll let me in.”

What had seemed like a lark and good deed now felt like a con to Sadie, but she couldn’t figure out its next gambit. Let him sit on the curb after all. That might be safer. She said to Jack, “Maybe we should just take him back to Meredith.”

“Bars are closed,” Jack repeated. “Besides, if we don’t get him home, we’ll regret it forever.”

Forever? she thought. They’d known each other six hours. She cuddled up a little closer to Samuel Beckett and tried to feel Jack through him. All right, she wouldn’t go home, though she wanted to, her little studio apartment, too disordered for a visitor of any kind, particularly for one she wanted to—what verb was she looking for? Impress, she decided, followed by fuck.