I don’t know about you, she said, but I really did not like that man. My friend was the one who said we should go hear him, because she’s a big fan. Honestly, if we hadn’t been sitting right under his nose, I think I might’ve got up and left. I mean, I know he’s a big intellectual and all, with important things to say, but I think tone matters, and his tone really bugged me. And I’m not saying he isn’t right about how bad things are—I tremble for my grandchildren’s future, believe me—but to talk like that, like there’s no hope, I don’t know, that just seems wrong to me. I don’t think anyone has the right to tell people there’s no hope. You can’t just get up and tell people there’s no hope! And it doesn’t make sense. He thinks you can take away people’s hope and then expect them to—what did he say?—love and take care of each other? Like, how is that going to happen.

I agreed that this was a good point.

And can you imagine, she said, if people ever really got so hopeless about life that they stopped having kids? Sounds like something from a dystopian novel. In fact, I’m sure I read that in a book somewhere. Or maybe it was that the state had made getting pregnant a crime. I forget. Anyway, I can’t believe he’s serious. Telling people to stop having kids. Who the hell is he?

He was my ex. But I didn’t say that.

And did you notice, she said, even though it was a campus event, there were almost no young people there?

I had noticed.

I guess it’s not really their thing, she said.

Well, I can’t say it wasn’t an interesting way to spend an evening, she said. What did you think?

I agreed that it was an interesting way to spend an evening.

Are you sure you don’t want some tea? Anything? A glass of wine?

No, that’s all right, thanks, I said.

Before I went to my room, it occurred to me to tell her about the man who’d left the talk whistling “My Favorite Things.”

Oh, that’s hilarious, she said. She had a sharp, tooting laugh. I never liked that sappy song, but I do know all the words.

And so, in yet another of that day’s odd moments, I stood in the kitchen of a strange house listening to a woman I didn’t know sing all the words to “My Favorite Things.”

—

In bed, about to turn out the light, I picked up the topmost book from the stack of mysteries on the nightstand. A psychological thriller in the tradition of Highsmith and Simenon, set in the seamy noirish world of seventies New York.