He poured an overlarge goblet of red table wine and sat down at the table with a modest stack of cookbooks before him, but none of their paltry indexes included squid or their alias, cuttlefish. The dream was now offering up a banal polarity of the bad following the good. The suggestion of clarity and power and grace left him feeling stupid when it had diffused. Major moves had to be made and the usual major moves in a man’s life involve his job. Of which he had none. Since he lacked a living mother, his aunt had framed his B.S. and M.B.A. degrees as a Christmas gift. They were tucked in the upper shelf of a closet next to a stack of his favorite issues of Oui, Penthouse and Playboy. He eschewed the hardcore. There was also a barely used vibrator-dildo that Diana considered absurd. He suspected that only a few feet of the old slide down a banister would be sufficient to push her into a frenzy. He knocked on a wood dresser for good luck.

He remembered with a tinge the sheer busyness of selling computer hardware in the Midwest for Burroughs: the rushed lunches and conferences at airports as far flung as Dayton, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Flint; the excited bull sessions with other young salesmen that tapered off after a few years passed. Then the sudden upward move of administering a medium sized family foundation. Marilyn had liked that though her father, a stockbroker from Bloomfield Hills, had recommended he stick with computer hardware. He was proven right in a loathsome way when the IRS began cracking down on family foundations as elaborate tax dodges. By then his first marriage was a sulfurous fumarole and he had given his paper “The Plight of Foundations” to the Spartan Economics Club. Diana was there with a smart-ass senior whose questions led to an after the meeting beer at a student boîte. Their future was sealed (when the boyfriend had gone to pee) with long breathless stares, a classic case of love at first sight—and an equally classic messy aftermath.

The sink was still running. He returned to the kitchen to find that he had inadvertently turned on the warm water and now had a partially poached five pound glob returning his loveless stare from the sink, the squid eyes clouded and deliquescent.