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confidential air and mimicked the waitress's rat-a-tat voice: "New place opening. East eleven. Says it's Russian. But don't even go there. Totally fake. Totally disgusting. They pee in the
pelmeni.
Waitresses illegal. All sluts."
    "But the new place is not actually open yet?"
    "No."
    "So how does Dora know?"
    "She's seen 'definite sluts' going in for interviews, apparently. And she knows the chef. Famous for peeing in
pelmeni
the world over."
    Molly drew a faux-macho breath. "What the hell is
pelmeni,
anyway?"
    "Dumplings. Stuffed with cabbage, cheese, mushrooms. That kind of thing. Gogol's favorite."
    "Did Dora tell you that?"
    "No ... No, that was my mum."
    "Useful."
    "Very useful. Dietary preferences—I know 'em all, Turgenev to Tchaikovsky and back again. Just in case you ever need me to rustle up something for one of the great men of Russian culture." Isabella wrinkled her nose. "I'd better jump in the bath now, if that's okay. Wouldn't want to be late for the office. I've got opportunity matrices to evaluate."
    "Sure. Go right ahead. Help yourself to one of those fizz-bomb things. They're glorious. Really ... fizzy."
    "Thanks. Don't wait up. I may be a few days."

    Molly took a tentative sip of her milkless Darjeeling. She had a shrewd enough idea of what lay behind Isabella's impromptu visit. For one thing, something was going on upstairs. She suspected that Isabella found Sasha unfulfilling—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Indeed, she knew for certain that Isabella found the general obviousness of masculinity tedious, since a common theme of their concert nights out together was Isabella being amusingly caustic about the clumsy gambits of stupid men. She did a great impression of the coy-but-almost-immediate way that they peddled inventories of their "interests"—"the shit fiction, the shit films, the shit music, the clichés,
the clichés, Mol, the same old clichés." And yet Isabella also seemed to do down the smart ones—for their dishonest charm, their self-satisfied pride in playing the man-woman game, their "cultivated eccentricities," their "depth." All of which analysis Molly had much sympathy for. Sasha and men aside, though, it also occurred to Molly that Isabella's habitually sardonic chatter might be symptomatic of a deeper unease. The difficulty, however, was getting Isabella to open up. Evidently this stuff about broken boilers was total crap.

    Thirty-five minutes later, Isabella came back into Molly's bedroom, dressed now in her trouser suit and businesslike despite herself.
    "Thanks for the bath, Mol. That was just what I needed." She fetched her cup from the little bedside table and dropped it into a brown paper bag. Reality poured back into the vacuum of the vanished humor. "I'll call tomorrow."
    "Do."
    Isabella's eyes met those of her friend a moment and then traveled around the room as if looking for further cups that required disposing of. "Shall I bring your laptop over?"
    "Yes. Thanks. That's helpful. You'd better bring the power cable too, though." Molly shifted her weight. "The battery connection keeps cutting out. I'll plug it in down here."
    The laptop was on the tiny desk by the window. Isabella moved smartly around the end of the bed.
    "You know," Molly said, her voice gentle, her head following the passage of her friend. "You know, I've been thinking—you should put on those mini-concerts we keep talking about. Keep the momentum going—find some musicians who don't look and behave like social-problem children and persuade your friends to come along. Your thing for Sasha's birthday was cool. How many people? Two hundred. And everybody loved it. Everybody. And that was only piano and violin."
    "I know," Isabella said. "But I'm not sure people would come—not if it weren't some kind of a special occasion."
    "Oh, they would. Definitely. You have a pretty big e-mail list already."
    The wires into Molly's computer were all twisted.
    "All these things