And then he was gone.

Alone, Hook sat facing the bare wall in the alcove. He knew that within an hour he would be there, at the place where his son had died, and he knew it would be an act of madness to some degree, an act without any of his usual caution or circumspection. So he wondered about his sanity at the moment. His eldest son was lying on a table under a sheet a half-dozen blocks away, and yet here he was, not weeping, not lying on some lonely motel bed staring at the ceiling and longing that the ache in his heart presaged some final fatal bursting, not in the expectation that he would then be with his wife and son again in some mystic nether dimension but rather that he would simply be free once and for all time, free of life, no longer an inmate of this crowded planetary madhouse where nature somehow had accomplished the crowning monstrosity of developing a race of mortal gods, of thinking animals, beings designed for no other purpose, it seemed, than to suffer.

That should have been his reaction, Hook felt. Instead, here he was, not at all the bitter philosophic mourner of his expectations but suddenly all cold blood and colder rage—and suddenly hungry too, he realized, as the waitress came to his table to warm his coffee. He ordered a T-bone steak dinner and a vodka on ice.

When the waitress served his drink she asked him if he would like to switch to the other side of the table, so that he would not be facing the wall. He told her no, that he would stay where he was.

The cab driver who answered his call turned out not to be the one who had driven him in from the airport, and for that Hook was grateful. This one was old and taciturn, a Mexican-American with wine on his breath, and when Hook told him where he wanted to go, all the man did was grunt before throwing the battered Ford into gear and driving off. The telephone book listed Dorothy Rubin’s address as 2010 Cliff Drive, a road Hook remembered from the old days, when Mrs. Cunningham had treated him to a champagne picnic on a lonely stretch of beach west of the city. They had stayed there well past nightfall, making love part of the time but mostly just sitting together huddled between blankets and wordlessly communing with the driftwood fire he had built. That night she had gone down on him for the first time and he remembered it afterwards not only as one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences of his life but also liberating, even shattering, for until then his innocence was such that he had thought of the act only in relation to whores and perverts. Back at the hotel she had continued his education by having him join her in the bathtub, where they spent almost an hour drinking more champagne and soaping the sea salt off each other’s body, and where a Mexican-American waiter bringing in a late-night supper saw them together through the open bathroom door. His expression, a comic mask of studied indifference in which his black eyes kept drifting rebelliously to the open door, set them laughing like the half-drunk lovers they were, once he had left the suite.