Desmond got up and shut off the record player. Russell was lying on the red velvet sofa in the living room, his head on one arm, his bare feet sunk into one of the cushions. His eyeglasses were resting on his forehead, and he had a book, a massive history of the Middle Ages he’d been reading for several days, spread open on his stomach. Russell Abrams came from a family of fire-breathing academics: an economist father who spent half his life delivering lectures in countries Desmond had never heard of and a child psychologist mother who’d written an infamous book arguing that play was the construct of frivolous adults and a complete waste of time. They lived in the Berkeley hills where Russell and his sister had grown up. Russell had rebelled against their intellectual snobbery by moving to New York and teaching art to special needs children in the public school system. Four years ago, he’d retired from teaching so that he and a friend could open the secondhand shop on the Lower East Side, an even more hostile gesture to his parents. Desmond, who’d initially taken Russell’s anti-intellectual palaver at face value, had never escaped feeling betrayed by him for reading so eclectically and ravenously. All those tomes Russell foraged through on a weekly basis—dense volumes of history, art, and science, and last year all of Trollope—lay around the apartment like reminders of his own literary inadequacies. This was one of the challenges of being in a long-term relationship; sustaining necessary delusions about yourself when someone was always there to witness your limitations and exaggerations and malign you with the truth about yourself.

“I’ve been thinking,” Russell said. “For your next book, you should write something that has a little more in it than a biography.”

Desmond gave Russell’s body a gentle push and lay beside him, their noses practically touching. The air conditioner in the window opposite them was blowing a chilly breeze in the general vicinity of their legs. “What more is there than the story of a whole life, sweetheart?”

“Less, for one thing. Less childhood and youth and old age, the whole dirge of time and the river. Lives are so unfocused and open to interpretation. I think you might do better with something clean and simple.”

“For example?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A murder, that’s always good. You’ve got a background in law, so you’d be a natural.”