It didn’t seem likely that Brian would be playing footsie with him under the table, his pregnant wife on one side and disapproving sister on the other, but even the possibility, however remote, made Desmond feel lightly, carelessly aroused. What was it Jane had said, Ride with it and try to have a good time? What was the point in drinking too much and risking blowing your career if you weren’t going to indulge in a bit of inebriated recklessness? He pushed back against the leg with a gentle rocking motion.

“She asked you if she’s still living,” Thomas said.

Desmond looked down to the other end of the table where Joyce was leaning toward him, apparently fascinated by Anderton’s life story. He pulled his leg back, felt himself blush, and said, “No. No, she died almost ten years ago. Just outside Boston.”

“I can certainly understand coming here to die,” Rosemary said. “It’s coming here to live that I don’t understand.”

4.

After coffee had been served, Desmond asked for directions to the bathroom. The kitchen was clean and dark and smelled of a citrusy detergent, and the dishwasher was churning. The caterers might not have been the best cooks in the world, but they’d left the place spotless. Earlier in the day, Desmond had gone into a shop on Newbury Street that sold alternative remedies for an amazing variety of problems. He’d walked past the place dozens of times, vowing never to enter despite a fascination with the shelves of pill bottles and the scrubbed, lab-coated clerks. When he finally broke down and went in this afternoon, he’d been delighted to see that in addition to selling treatments for everything from broken bones to cancer, Healthy Living sold tablets and capsules and tinctures for Uneasiness, Insecurity, and Confusion, exactly the sorts of ills he was trying to cure. When he asked the clerk if she had anything to heighten mental clarity, she’d shown him a bottle of tiny white pills which, she assured him, had been used for centuries in Turkey. (Everything in the store seemed to have been tested in places like Romania, Albania, or a remote mountainous country known for its appalling health care.) He felt quite certain she would have been equally unruffled by a request for something to help finish your biography of Pauline Anderton. It was time for his evening dose. He opened a cabinet over the stove, but instead of glasses he saw an elaborate display of cake decorating utensils, pastry bags and assorted nipples, food coloring, and tiny spatulas. Gerald’s, no doubt. He decided to forgo the water and started chewing up a handful of pills. You can’t OD on them, the clerk had assured him, an admission of ineffectiveness if ever he’d heard one.