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run you lose unless you have an in or load the dice. No matter how hardworking or conscientious he might be (and he decided he was), success like his was not deserved. That was the beauty and the ugly of real estate, maybe even of capitalism. But he tried to defend himself in his usual way: “I’ve just been lucky, that’s all.”
    â€œSame thing,” said Zoltan, as if reading his mind. “Luck, cunning, charm, fraud—everything counts. Even your pose of modesty: all part of it. Now tell me, Mack, is that who you really are? If so, you must live with it. Or give it up.”
    Mack blushed. “Give what up?”
    â€œYou know.”
    Oh, he knew. The bravado. The bluff. The pretense of being someone he wasn’t. He’d once dreamed of a life in science, or of a life in art. But graduating from college deep in debt (he was the first member of his family to graduate from any university, much less Yale), Mack was not so reckless as to join his classmates to denounce the fathers—not with an uncle offering to initiate him into the mysteries of real estate. He was still in debt, of course, with mortgages and promissory notes and a sometime cash-flow problem (even Trump had his cash-flow problems). But those very debts somehow enhanced his status, enabling him to expand. Yes, he knew what Zoltan meant. The Phi Beta Kappa key in his wallet, his superb collection of opera CDs, the Hockney, the Motherwell, the Wesley, the small bronze De Kooning, even the house—none of them made up for his recurrent feeling of being an impostor, an incipient failure, a fraud. He knew it as well as Zoltan did, and if heshould forget it for a moment, his wife was there to remind him. But how could he change? His life was built on it. How could he “give it up”?
    â€œHow?” he whispered. “Tell me how.”
    Zoltan shrugged. “My telling you will not help you. Everyone must find out himself. Anyway, you would not believe me. I could maybe show you, but … always people resist.”
    â€œTry me.”
    â€œBut you leave tomorrow?”
    â€œWe still have the rest of tonight.”
    The waiter cleared away their plates and handed them dessert menus.
    â€œCome on,” urged Mack. “It’s a beautiful night. I’d like to see the ocean. Whenever you want I’ll take you back.”
    â€œOkay. I accept. With pleasure.”
    Mack let out a sigh of relief. “Good. Then it’s settled. Now, what’ll it be for dessert? Maja particularly liked the chocolate decadence.”
    Zoltan closed the menu. Having found his stride, he allowed the postponed grin of triumph to spread across his lips as he proposed, “Soufflé Grand Marnier for two.”
    â€”—
    HEATHER CONCLUDED HER DRAFT and closed her laptop. Why did she find it so easy to write her columns but so difficult to compose her stories? The need to save the planet was urgent, and the market for fiction fading; yet it was to art, not politics, that she aspired. Irrational, she knew. An audience for her columns was practically guaranteed, while her stories, if they were published at all, would probably find homes only in obscure literary journals, supposing there were any left to publish in by the time she was ready to submit them. Still, to her, one was a job, the other an achievement, perhaps a calling. Even if she were reduced to self-publishing, which reputedly no longer carried the stigma it had before the Internet, she was determined to try. Self-indulgent? Anachronistic? Doomed? She didn’t care.
    But she was getting ahead of herself. As of now, she had no stories; she had a family. She turned off the light on her desk, then walked downstairs to check on her sleeping babes. Chloe lay supine, with her hair fanned out across her pillow and her arms spread wide, like a tiny diva. Her wondrous eyelashes, dark and thick, fluttered as Heather tenderly tucked in the flannel sheet.