In addition to the show Jane produced, several news, cooking, and gardening programs were filmed at the studios of WGTB. Desmond knew you always had to expect that movie and media personalities would be smaller and less impressive (although generally better looking) in person than they were on screen, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the studios themselves might be so morbidly ordinary. As Jane gave him a tour of the building, he found himself marveling at the ticky-tacky, taped-together, temporary appearance of things: everything out of sight of the camera could have been part of a high school production of Our Town—metal folding chairs behind a news anchor’s desk, backdrops on which the painted scenery ended in mid brush stroke, a wastebasket filled with oily paper behind a chef’s kitchen counter.

“If you look at anything too closely,” Jane said, catching his glance, “it starts to look seedy. I’m talking about the studio, not life.”

Maybe so, but he’d often thought that it was true of life as well. The young couple who lived above him in New York were so loving on the street, but so volatile and vicious in private. Then there was Peter, who appeared to have been living a double life for a good portion of the time Desmond had known him. Or, to take a more frightening example, his own carefully hidden ambivalence about Russell, which perhaps, given recent events, hadn’t been hidden carefully enough.

Jane slipped her arm through his as she had on the street. He was flattered by her attention, but he couldn’t tell if she genuinely liked him or was trying to convince herself she did. Maybe—according to her theories—they were essentially the same thing. “I won’t even show you the set of my show. Imagine a windowless conference room in a real estate office and you’ve got the general idea. We stick a vase of fresh flowers in the middle of the table and it looks like the Four Seasons. That’s the genius of it. Anyone can make a lovely set look lovelier, but to transform a wreck into something beautiful is a talent.”

They were passing through a room set up with rows of long tables equipped with telephones and pitchers of water. “Fund-raising,” Jane said. “Every time a right-winger gets up and makes a speech against us, we have to take on more volunteers to handle the pledges. I’ve even flirted with the idea of voting Republican myself as some contorted way of keeping the station alive.”