Much of the time Hook did not listen. He toyed with his drink and smoked cigarettes and watched out the window as the sun slipped into the sea, setting red fire to an armada of high cirrus clouds moving down the coast. And finally there was no light at all out there except the streetlamps along the boulevard and the drilling platforms shining like Christmas trees at sea, and then themselves, him and Douglas, reflected in the glass. And Hook began to lose his resolve, gave in to a growing feeling of anger and impatience, and drained his glass, filled it again, and drank again, keeping up with Douglas now until the fifth was almost empty. He was afraid Douglas would order more, but instead the man suddenly shoved back his chair and carefully stood up, apparently still sober enough to want to hide from his friends and once-future constituents that he was not altogether sober. On the way out, he gave the waitress a twenty-dollar bill and a pat on the bottom, for which he received in return a smile that suggested their relationship was not confined to the penthouse bar.

Downstairs, in Hook’s car, Douglas proposed that they drive out to his house because he thought it “only fitting and proper” that Hook meet his family “on this, the last happy night of their lives.” Hook agreed to drive him home but said he would not go in.

“I still don’t share your gallows humor,” he said. “None of this is a joke to me.”

“You won’t come in because you’re chicken,” Douglas explained, grinning in the glow of the Galaxie’s dashboard. “You’re like a bomber pilot. You’d just as soon not see your victims.”

“My ‘victims’ will live.”

Douglas was still grinning. “Sure. On crutches.”

Hook dropped the conversation, aware suddenly that this drive to Montecito was nothing like his first one a few nights before. Now the narrow road curving back and forth through the eucalyptus trees held no threat for him, and the trip was going much more rapidly, like a movie montage, just bits and pieces his mind casually selected to honor with his attention. So he told himself—warned himself—that he was half drunk, that he had to slow down and concentrate, stay in control.

Nevertheless, when they came to Douglas’s house, and Douglas again asked him to come in and meet his family, Hook impulsively acceded. What was there to lose? He did not care if they were all as happy and handsome as a television comedy family; it would not affect him. What shame and pain they might have to endure would not be of his making; it would be a gift of their father and husband, and no one else. So Hook got out of the car and followed Douglas up the flagstone walk to the front entrance, a pair of ornately carved doors, which Douglas had to unlock to open. Inside, he cheerily called for, first, his wife, and then his children, and finally settled for a “Hey—anybody home?”