He lifted a midget bottle of vodka and a pygmy can of Bloody Mary mix; he didn’t know I’d only ordered a Bloody Mary because it was acceptable to do so before ten a.m. He was a man who drank and ate what he wanted at any time of day.

“We’ll toast to our betrayers,” he said.

Because it was something he might say to a midnight caller, I said, “I thought we only ever betrayed ourselves.”

“Sometimes we look for accomplices. No ice,” he said, turning to me. “To get through this we’re gonna need some ice.”

For a moment it felt as though we were in a jail instead of a reasonably nice hotel, sentenced to live out our days—live out our days being another way to say hurtle toward death.

In those days it was easy to disappear from view. All the people who caused you pain: you might never know what happened to them, unless they were famous, as the radio shrink was, and so I did know, it happened soon afterward, before the snow had melted. He died of a heart attack at another hotel, and Evaline Benjamin, the Love of His Life, flew from Chicago to be with him, and a guest host took over until the guest host was the actual host and it slid from a call-in advice show to a show about unexplained phenomena: UFOs. Bigfoot. I suppose it had been about the unexplained all along. All the best advice is on the internet now anyhow. That person who broke my heart might be a priest by now, or happily gay, or finally living openly as a woman, or married twenty-five years, or all of these things at once, or 65 percent of them, as is possible now in our world. It’s good that it’s possible. A common name plus my bad memory for faces: I wouldn’t know how to start looking or when to stop.

The minibar wasn’t equal to our thirsts. He sat so long, staring out the window, that I wondered whether something had gone wrong. A stroke. The start of ossification. Then in a spasm of fussiness he untucked his shirt.

He said, “In another life—”

“Yeah?”

“I would have been a better man. How long?”

“How long what?”

“Was your relationship with whoever broke your heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart.”

“‘Was mean to you,’” he said, with a playacting look on his face.

I did the math in my head, and rounded up. “A month.”

“You,” he said, in his own voice, which I understood I was hearing for the first time, “have got to be fucking kidding me.”

It had actually been two and a half weeks. “Don’t say I’m young,” I told him.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But someday something terrible will happen to you and you’ll hate this version of yourself.”