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family.”
    “It is not too painful,” Tripp said. “What do you wish to know?”
    “Whatever you wish to tell me. Talk about them a little, your wife, your kids, what they liked to do, how they got along, anything interesting about them. I’m just looking for a place to start.”
    Tripp smiled courteously. “Of course,” he said.
    He gestured at the waiter to bring him a second Manhattan. I declined a second club soda. I still had plenty left of the first one. Club sodas seemed to last longer than vodka martinis on the rocks with a twist.
    “We were,” Tripp said, “just about an ideal family. We were committed to one another, loved one another, cared about one another completely.”
    I nodded. The waiter brought the second Manhattan. Tripp drained the remainder of the first one and handed the glass to the waiter. The waiter completed the exchange and moved away. Tripp stared at the new Manhattan without drinking any.
    “The thing was,” he said, “not only were Olivia and I husband and wife, we were pals. We enjoyed each other. We enjoyed our children.”
    He paused, still staring at the untouched drink in front of him. He shuddered briefly. “To have so good a thing shattered so terribly…”
    I waited. He picked up the Manhattan and took a small sip and replaced it. I ignored my club soda.
    “I know it sounds, probably, too good to be true, nostalgia or something, but, by golly, it was good. There’ll never be anyone like her.”
    He broke off and we sat quietly. In the silence the waiter brought our lunch. I had opted for a chicken sandwich. Tripp had scrod. The food was every bit as good as it was at the Harvard Faculty Club where I had eaten a couple of years ago.
    There weren’t many women in the dining room. At a table next to the wall two men in suits were ordering more drinks. One of them was a U.S. Senator, still pink from the steam room, whose drink, when it arrived, appeared to be a tall dark scotch and soda. At the table next to me were three guys dressed by the same costumer. All wore dark blue suits with a thin chalk stripe, white shirts with discreetly rolled button-down collars, red ties. The ties varied-one red with tiny white dots, one a darker red with blue stripes, one blue paisley on a red background. He who would be a man must be a non-conformist. One of them was holding forth. He was large without being muscular, and his neck spilled out a little over his collar.
    “So there’s Buffy,” he was saying, “bare ass in the middle of the fucking tennis court, and…”
    “I suppose it seems idealized to you,” Tripp said. “I imagine people tend to talk that way after a great loss.”
    “I just listen,” I said.
    “And make no judgments?”
    “Open-shuttered and passive,” I said. “Not thinking, merely recording.”
    “Always?”
    “At least until all the precincts are heard from,” I said.
    “I would find that difficult, I guess,” Tripp said.
    I chewed on my chicken sandwich. The chicken had traveled some distance from the coop. The slices in my sandwich were perfectly round and wafer thin. But the bread was white, and the pale lettuce was limp.
    I finished chewing and said, “What I do requires a certain amount of distance, sort of a willful suspension, I suppose.”
    “A what?”
    I shook my head. “Literary allusion,” I said. “I was just showing off.”
    “Olivia was a great one for that. She was always quoting somebody.”
    “She taught literature, did she not?”
    “Yes, and theater, at Shawmut College. Her students loved her.”
    I nodded. I was trying to pick up the conversation at the next table. They were discussing what Buffy had tattooed on her buttocks.
    “She was a marvelous teacher,” Tripp said. He was eating his scrod at a pace that would take us into the dinner hour. If he and Susan had an eating race you couldn’t get a winner.
    The Senator had finished one dark scotch and soda, and had another, partly drunk, in his left hand. He was