“Fine. He’s the one who arranged it.”

“Whadyou mean?”

“It started as a threesome, actually. Sort of like the blackbirds on the wall. Now there’s two. I think they’ve just gotten tired of each other, Ian and Margaret.”

“I see … Well, she seems quite nice. Very bright.”

“She knows a lot about music, too, man. We learn a lot from each other. But what are you doing over here?”

“A little business.”

“Give over, Fire. It’s Sylvia, isn’t it?”

“Just cool, man.”

“Come on, Fire. I’m not stupid y’know. I was the one who brought the parcel for you.”

“Just cool, man. I can’t really talk right now.”

“Come on, Fire. I won’t tell.”

He leaned into the phone. “Okay … but this is between me and you.”

After washing the dishes from the night before, and sealing the cookies in sandwich bags, he trawled her fridge and cupboards for a sense of her taste and went out to the shops to get ingredients for breakfast, leaving behind a note to say he’d soon return.

On the night when he’d dropped her off at home, he was remembering now, the driver had taken a route past some Middle Eastern shops.

After a few wrong turns he found it, the old Lebanese quarter along Atlantic Avenue near Smith Street—not so much a bazaar as a throwback to the civility of prewar Beirut—where men with dark mustaches and open-necked shirts sipped cardamom coffee at sidewalk cafés and women dressed by Macy’s ordered baklava and pistachio cakes in French as well as Arabic as their Segaddicted kids waited outside to make sure the cops didn’t ticket the Camry.

Inside Sahadi Importing, a neighborhood suprette whose informality seemed to mock the yuppies who wanted to insist it was gourmet, he edged around barrels of bulgur wheat and fava beans, and squeezed by counters lined with five-gallon jars of dates and figs and nuts and sun-dried fruit, choosing for his basket carefully by using his senses the way his mother had taught him—sniffing for signs of fermentation, squeezing for fitness, even listening. The sign of a good avocado is a rattling seed.

On the way back he picked up a shirt, some socks, and some boxers at a Gap on Montague Street. Once inside the apartment, he checked to see that Sylvia was fine and then went about prepping breakfast. He showered and changed and waited for her to rise, feeling quite at home now after taking a seat on her toilet.

In the living room again, he turned on the telly and switched back and forth between a key contest in Mexican-league soccer and an episode of Xena, wondering as he smothered his laughter who was the worse actor, the striker taking a dive in the penalty box or the gladiator trying to sound like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.