“Third grade,” she said. If he was beginning to flatter her already, there was a good chance Caroline had broken down and told him what this was all about. In that case, the best tactic was to let him think she was warming up to him, and then go for the jugular when he was least expecting it. The advantage of dealing with vain, self-confident men like Dale was that they couldn’t imagine anyone being two steps ahead of them and so were always vulnerable. Although he didn’t look vulnerable. The suit brought out his tan and the light in his amber-colored eyes. You couldn’t blame the man for dressing so well, but you certainly could resent him for always knowing exactly what piece of clothing would bring out his best features, especially if you had no instinct for clothes and accessories yourself and were therefore at the mercy of every avaricious salesclerk in the world with an advanced degree in fatuous flattery. To kill time this afternoon, she’d gone into a little jewelry shop on Newbury Street and bought a much too expensive pair of jade green earrings which the salesgirl had described as a great color and style for her. But as she was coming into the hotel, she caught a glimpse of herself in a wall-sized mirror. She saw freakishly big plastic triangles in a garish shade of lime with a graying head attached. She’d slipped them off and tossed them into her bag. Dale was good on details and would know immediately that they were brand-new and the purchase of them was somehow connected to seeing him.

The key to Dale’s beauty was his ugliness. His face combined the worst elements of his father and his Irish mother, a punk’s crooked nose, a fat mouth that was too large for his square, lean face, and those droopy Armenian eyes, all topped off by a thick brush of blue-black hair that refused to be tamed. Any one feature by itself was appalling, but they fell together in a way that made him look like a carefully sculpted ideal of rugged magnificence, not pretty, not perfect, just irresistible. Even his perfectly ordinary height worked to his advantage; taller men looked gawky and clumsy standing next to solid, compact Dale.

“I don’t know what everyone sees in him,” a friend of Jane’s had once told her. “He looks like a prick to me.” Which was, of course, exactly what he looked like to everyone else.