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speak,” he said.
    “It’s all right.”
    “I feel bad.”
    “Don’t. I’m just glad you’re here. It’s been so long, Arthur. I feel as though I have to get to know you all over again. Tell me about your life.”
    “It’s the same. I’m the same.”
    “How’s your daughter?”
    “Engaged.”
    “Arthur. That’s wonderful. Who’s the lucky fellow?”
    “His name is Paul,” Pfefferkorn said. “He’s an accountant.”
    “And? What’s he like?”
    “What do you think he’s like? He’s like an accountant.”
    “Well, I think it’s wonderful.”
    “It will be come April fifteenth.”
    “You are happy for her, aren’t you?”
    “Sure I am,” he said. “I hope it works out.”
    Carlotta looked alarmed. “Do you have reason to suspect it won’t?”
    “Not really.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    “There isn’t any.” He paused. “I think I always pictured her with—I know how it’ll sound, but—someone more like me.”
    “And he’s the opposite of you.”
    “More or less.” He tapped his lips. “It feels like a rejection of everything I stand for.”
    “And what do you stand for.”
    “Poverty, I suppose. Failure.”
    “Tch.”
    “I’m jealous,” he said.
    “Think of it this way. She thinks you’re so fantastic a man that she could never hope to find someone
as
fantastic unless she chose someone utterly unlike you.”
    “That’s an interesting interpretation.”
    “I try,” Carlotta said. “When’s the wedding?”
    “They don’t know.”
    “That’s the way it’s done these days, isn’t it. Get engaged and wait until having children becomes medically impossible. It was different in our day. People couldn’t wait to get married.”
    “They couldn’t wait to screw.”
    “Please. You make it sound like we grew up in the fifteenth century.”
    “Didn’t we?”
    “Oh, Arthur, you really are such a
grump
.” She pointed below to a narrow path, barely visible, that led into an area of unchecked greenery. “That’s the way to Bill’s office.”
    He nodded.
    “Would you like to see it?” she asked.
    “If you’d like to show it to me.”
    “I would,” she said. “And I think he would have wanted you to see it, too.”

14.
    They moved through the underbrush, ducking ferns and low-hanging vines, the dog bounding ahead in pursuit of a dragonfly. The light turned murky. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was heading into the heart of darkness. Rounding a mossy outcropping, they came to a glade flecked with dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace. Botkin sat by the door to a boxy wooden building, his tail swishing.
    “Voilà,” Carlotta said.
    Pfefferkorn regarded the building. “Looks like a barn,” he said.
    “It was.”
    “There you go.”
    “The previous owner was something of a gentleman farmer. He bred champion goats.”
    Pfefferkorn snorted.
    “Don’t laugh,” she said. “The good ones go for upwards of fifty thousand dollars.”
    “For a
goat?
”
    “You don’t live around here if you’re poor. You know the part on a ballpoint pen cap that sticks out? So you can clip it onto something? He invented that.”
    “My future son-in-law will be impressed.”
    “Bill loved it out here,” Carlotta said. “He called it his refuge. From what, I wanted to know. He never did say.”
    “I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally,” Pfefferkorn said. “You know how he could be.”
    “Oh I know. Believe me.” She smiled mischievously. “Sometimes when I’m out here I swear I can smell them. The goats.”
    Pfefferkorn tried and failed to smell the goats.
    “All right,” she said. “Let’s see where the magic happens.”
    What struck Pfefferkorn most of all about Bill’s office was its modesty. Only a tenth of the barn had been sectioned off and finished, and that left comparatively spare. Indeed, it was strange to think that such phenomenal wealth as Pfefferkorn had just seen could be produced in a room so plain. Atop a rickety desk were an electric