“Just checking a couple of boxes in the basement. We’re planning to open a ‘90s room down there, for all the shit we can’t figure out what to do with up here. He’ll be up in a minute.” She tipped her pretty, angular face to the ceiling and blew out a lungful of smoke. “It’s nice to talk to you, one on one. I hate when everything is about couples and you can’t even talk to a person but you have to talk to some goddamned couple. Sometimes you look at this couple and you don’t see two people sitting there, you see one behemoth with two mouths.”

“Right.” He hated to agree with Melanie, whose theories usually seemed crackpot, but sometimes he just had to.

“So, tell me about this school you’re teaching at. What’s it called?”

Desmond liked Melanie and had been infected with a smaller dose of Russell’s desire to watch over her and take care of her. She claimed to be “well into” her thirties, but Desmond would have bet good money that she was no more than twenty-eight. Despite a disfiguring bleached crew cut and a recently acquired fondness for tattoos, she could look, in unguarded moments, like an abandoned child. She always wore white sleeveless T-shirts to display the bands of colorful design inked into her scrawny upper arms. She insisted upon pulling out chairs for Desmond, holding doors open for him, and hailing cabs, all of which he would have found unbearably emasculating if she hadn’t been so blatantly vulnerable. Desmond started to tell her what he knew about Deerforth College, but after two sentences, she pulled a business card out of her shirt pocket and began to study it intently. Desmond let his words trail off.

“A friend of yours?” he asked, nodding toward the card.

“Not exactly. Maybe. I hope so. Let’s just say gorgeous, whatever she is.”

Melanie had the single most calamitous love life Desmond had ever heard of. She was always falling in love with lanky, glamorous women, the more audaciously blond, wealthy, and unavailable, the better. Most were Upper East Side types who popped into the store while slumming their way through the East Village with a friend. To prove her love and chivalry, Melanie showered these chilly goddesses with phone calls, flowers, and absurdly expensive gifts. Few, if any, of these entanglements blossomed into sexual relationships—a returned phone call was a major triumph—but that didn’t seem to make them less powerful for Melanie. Eventually, they all ended with Melanie harassing her love objects and then retreating into a depression when she received threatening letters from lawyers. Legions of muscular plumbers and electricians who worked in the neighborhood pursued her, just dying, apparently, to show her what she was missing.