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or could be seen now and then indolently moving along at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. . . not exactly the concerned God people pray to or petition, but, hell, it’s a start, it’s something, if not everything we have if we want to be true to ourselves.

    â€”Heist
    Wednesday
    Trish giving a dinner when I got here. The caterer’s man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond of time, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She’s doing the veal paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual fund manager. Odds on theFrenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish’s glance over the rim of the wine glass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the amused blue eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I’d slunk home. But isn’t it terrible that after it’s over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do you have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven’t even gotten around to Your small-time perversities. I mean, when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence? And it’s the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn’t Trish.
    But the dining room was the least of it. It’s a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.
    We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.

    In the E-mail:

    â€œdear father if u want to no where yor cross go to 2531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an cuts the chickns troats.”

    â€œDear Reverend, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York. . .”

    â€œDear Father, I am one of a group of your neighbors in nearby New Jersey who have taken a Sacred Oath to defend this Republic and the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ from alien heathen interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thingthese people understand, The Gun that is our porrogative to hold as free white Americans. . .”

    â€”This afternoon as we lay side by side on our backs Moira told me about herself: She grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania. She went to Penn State for two years before dropping out and leaving for New York. She thought a job in publishing would be nice but in the meantime was working as a temp in a corporate headquarters when her future husband, the CEO, happened to notice her. I knew the rest of the story: He had her assigned to his own secretarial staff, took her out a few times, proposed, and set about terminating his twenty-year marriage. You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement. In another era, spats and top hats, he might have gone to the theater and picked out a girl in the chorus line. We are not so flamboyant now, we have culture, real art hangs on the office walls, we sprinkle our dinner parties with novelists, filmmakers. We know who Wittgenstein was.
    For her part, Moira severed the little connection she had with her family by not inviting them to her wedding.
    And that is the genealogy of her serene certitude, and her charming air of being unimpressed to be among them, that the men and women of our set, myself