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that followed. She reminded herself that it could be much worse; it could be a constant shuttling around among days and times so that she couldn’t enjoy the exhilaration of a day or even two preceding Patric’s arrival in the gardens—the Jardin des Plantes or the Tuileries or the Luxembourg Gardens—places where she spent much of her time even when he was not with her because in these places she could think of his sitting or walking beside her—
    And the cafés—
    Ned stopped writing. The cafés. He took up his pen again.
    Most of the ones they liked were on the Boulevard St.-Germain (the Brasserie Lipp, the Café de Flore) but sometimes they visited the Right Bank cafés when they’d been in the Tuileries. They would walk up the Rue de la Paix to the café of that name to look at Americans who had found this street that they’d heard of in that old wartime song about Mimi, Mimi on the Rue de la Paix. Patric liked Americans more than other foreigners because they were so much brighter, so much more enthusiastic, and, in Patric’s words, “starry eyed.”
    Ned listened to the water hiccup, hiss, and burp its way through the Braun system. “Starry eyed.” Was that too much of a cliché, even for Patric? No, he was like that.
    Paris, sixty years ago.
    Here it came again, that revenant, that sack of shadows, the past, lighting up like the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, cascades of lights and colors, deceptive as a tinhorn fair. The past—there was hardly anything it wasn’t, or couldn’t be. It could aim straight as an arrow, or walk like a drunken lout, cavort, dissemble, deceive, seduce: anything to be let in. It could find him anytime, for he was always thinking about it in trying not to.
    The man across the path had gone; the sky eased from dusk into darkness. The huge hulk of the past lumbered on.
    Nathalie sat alone in the Jardin des Plantes.
    He left her there, he felt, at his peril.

FIVE
    T hat’s his condition,” said Clive. “That’s it.” He seemed to be trying to convince himself even more than he was trying to convince Bobby Mackenzie.
    Bobby’s office was not a reflection of Bobby himself; it had an almost cabin coziness brought on by the big, soft sofa against one wall, the upholstered chairs, a couple of Audubon-like paintings of birds in flight, a very good and very worn Karastan carpet, and a zillion books. But the thing that separated publishers from assistant editors in the pecking order was a view of Central Park that could be better seen only by one of those flighting birds.
    Bobby snorted. “That’s crazy.”
    Clive nodded. He usually did when he was talking to Bobby. So did everyone. “I said as much.”
    Bobby’s eyebrows danced upward. “You told Giverney he was crazy? Good career move.” Bobby wheeled his swivel chair over to the liquor cabinet, which was nearly within arm’s reach. He grabbed up the bourbon and a couple of glasses and wheeled back again.
    Now Clive snorted. “Not in so many words, of course not.” Christ, he wished Bobby would stop connecting everything Clive did to the furtherance of or the setback to his “career.” It was like blackmail. Why was he surprised? “I simply pointed out what would happen.”
    Bobby unscrewed the bottle with the finesse of a sleight-of-hand artist (which in many ways he was), raised one of the glasses in question to Clive, who nodded, and then poured a couple of fingers of bourbon into each glass. He sat back, rolled the glass between his hands across his chest as if to warm a frostbitten heart, and said, “Of course Tom would leave. Of course Ned would find another publisher. This is what would happen: Ned gets the heave-ho, Tom resigns, Ned waits to see what house Tom goes to, and then goes there himself. Giverney gains nothing—at least as far as we can see, Giverney being not only crazy but an egomaniac—and . . .” Bobby drank and shrugged. “Beats me.”
    “At least we’d get Giverney.”
    “Believe me,