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worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Richards, Reed & Associates’s major client was a locally popular brand of Polish sausage famous for its generous dimensions, which made writing ad copy a simple but delicate matter. I saw Emily’s secretary come through the revolving door and shake open her umbrella, and then her friends Susan and Ben, and then a man whose name I had forgotten but whom I recognized as the Engorged Kielbasa from an office skit a couple of Christmases earlier. There were all kinds of other people spinning out into the soft gray evening, dentists and podiatrists, certified public accountants, the sad-looking Ethiopian man who sold half-dead flowers from a small kiosk in the lobby; looking skyward, covering their heads with outspread newspapers, laughing at the guttering, rain-slick prospect of a Friday night downtown; but after fifteen minutes Emily had still not appeared, even though she was always downstairs waiting for me on Fridays when I came to pick her up, and eventually I was forced to admit to myself what I had been fervently denying all day: that sometime early this morning, before I awoke, Emily had walked out on our marriage. There’d been a note taped to the coffee machine on the kitchen counter, and a modest void in all the drawers and closets that had been hers.
    “Crabtree,” I said. “She left me, man.”
    “She what?”
    “She left me. This morning. There was a note. I don’t know if she even went to work. I think she might have gone out to her parents’ place. It’s Passover. Tomorrow’s the first night.” I turned around and looked at Miss Sloviak. She was sitting in the backseat, with Crabtree, on the theory that Emily would have been getting into the front with me. They had the tuba back there with them as well, though I wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. I still didn’t know if it really belonged to Miss Sloviak or not. “There are eight of them. Nights.”
    “Is he kidding?” said Miss Sloviak, all of whose makeup seemed in the course of the ride in from the airport to have been reapplied, very roughly, an inch to the left of her eyes and lips, so that her face had a blurred, double-exposed appearance.
    “Why didn’t you say anything, Tripp? I mean, why did you come down here?”
    “I guess I just…I don’t know.” I turned back around to face the windshield and listened to the commentary of the rain on the roof of my car, a fly-green ’66 Galaxie ragtop I’d been driving for a little less than a month. I’d had to accept it as repayment of a sizable loan I’d been fool enough to make Happy Blackmore, an old drinking buddy who wrote sports for the Post-Gazette and who was now somewhere in the Blue Ridge of Maryland at a rehabilitation center for the compulsively unlucky, playing out the last act of a spectacular emotional and financial collapse. It was a stylish old yacht, that Ford, with a balky transmission, bad wires, and a rear seat of almost infinite potential. I didn’t really want to know what had just been going on back there.
    “I was sort of thinking maybe I’d just imagined it all,” I said. As a lifelong habitué of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy, and all day I had been trying to convince myself that this morning at about six o’clock, while I lay snoring with my legs scissor-forked across the freshly uninhabited regions of the bed, my marriage had not come asunder. “Hoping I had, I mean.”
    “Do you feel all right?” said Miss Sloviak.
    “I feel great,” I said, trying to decide how I did feel. I felt sorry to have driven Emily to leave me, not because I thought that I could have done otherwise, but because she’d tried very hard for many years to avoid an outcome to which she was, in a way that would always remain beyond my understanding, morally opposed. Her own parents had married in 1939 and they