74 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
and superior, he had called their bluff
and forced them to follow through.
The house was an early-nineteenth-
century farmhouse, fixed up and ex-
panded over the years, painted charcoal
following the new style, a color like
smoke against the pitch-dark sky. It
had clapboard siding and a metal roof,
a mostly private small field with an old
stone wall and a falling-
down chicken coop, a tiny
creek, and a wild profusion
of ivy and flowers. Toward
the main road there was an
unpainted barn. Jack, who
had been so invested in set-
tling in—furnishing, re-
painting, touching up the
trim, replacing cracked
windowpanes, talking to
contractors, landscapers,
and arborists about what to do with
the chicken coop, the yard, the silver
maples and pin oaks—found himself
overcome with apathy. He could hardly
bring himself to wash the dishes or take
out the trash. The mail piled up un-
opened on a chair in the entryway. Not
long before, he had been a dynamo, on
the phone with lawyers and water-treat-
ment specialists, septic contractors, elec-
tricians, and insurance agents. He had
learned about ground wells and leach
fields, UV water-purification systems,
sump pumps, pipe fittings, cell-foam
insulation, byzantine tax exemptions
and property-tax schedules, the life span
of roofing shingles, aluminum roof coat-
ing, and septic-tank baffles. Baffles. He
liked that. That just about said it! Fi-
nally, he’d simply stopped.
Daniel, Jack’s friend from school,
said that Jack’s state of mind made a
lot of fucking sense. “Jesus, consider-
ing everything. Get drunk, get laid,” he
said. “The French would go out whor-
ing.” Jack supposed that he had been
the one to phone Daniel, but it no lon-
ger felt that way.
He had called for news of Sophie.
Daniel was a successful magazine writer
and someone Sophie often turned to
for professional advice. It was Daniel,
in fact, who had written the article on
Valente for the school paper (“Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Lineman”),
and who now told Jack that he should
give Valente a ring.
“Any word from Sophie?” Jack asked.
“Soph? She’s all right. She’s staying
at her parents’, but I guess you know
that.” Daniel laughed suddenly. “The
last time I saw her, she was hanging
out in bars, writing in a notebook, wait-
ing for guys to text her.”
Jack responded stoically. “What guys?”
“Dates? I don’t know. I think she said
she was writing a book. About contem-
porary dating, or dating
apps. Something like that.
Maybe she said ‘mating.’”
“I see. So she’s the one
out whoring,” Jack said.
“Yeah, you’re the only
one not having any fun.”
Jack could picture her
sitting at the bar, her black
hair unfurling about her
face as she bent over her
journal, pensive and day-
dreaming. It surprised him to find this
thought, the image of her sitting there,
poignant, rather than upsetting.
Still, when he reached her on the
phone, he said, “So I hear you’ve been
out whoring.”
She didn’t laugh at this but made a
noise that suggested fatigue or annoy-
ance, or perhaps both. “What did Dan-
iel tell you?”
Jack gave an inaccurate, largely imag-
inative account of the conversation. He
did not want to hurt Sophie, but at times
he felt the urge to be crude, and even
sometimes mean. It welled up in him
like an irresistible pressure, building be-
hind the prim dishonesty that obscured
the raw, dark realities of the heart.
When he had finished, Sophie was
quiet for a moment, then said, “I don’t
want to get in the habit of explain-
ing myself to you. So I guess I’m not
going to.”
“If it’s freedom, it has to feel like
freedom,” he suggested.
“Something like that.”
Later, with nothing to do, he tele-
phoned Valente. “Holy shit! Jack Fran-
cis?” Boy, was it Valente—that same
deep, echoic, excitable voice. “Dude, am
I glad you called,” Valente said. “My
mom is driving me crazy.”I
t was Valente who noticed the hol-
low. This was not during his first
visit, which he and Jack spent getting
very drunk. Jack told him about So-
phie, the D.A.’s office, and his briefforay into the private sector—the gen-
eral cul-de-sac into which he seemed
to have driven his life. Mostly, though,
he listened to Valente talk about the
years he had spent trying to get his ar-
tistic career off the ground, keeping
body and soul together on part-time
work. Valente had been employed by a
house-painting crew, but something
had happened and now he coached
women’s rugby at a Catholic college
across the river. The school was on
spring break that week.
They discussed college, of course,
and Jack was taken aback to find that
their memories of this time did not
align. He shouldn’t have been surprised
by this—Valente had many strange no-
tions—but it was vaguely unnerving to
see that two people could live through
the same experience and understand it
so differently. Jack said that he had
found everyone at college interesting
at first—unique and particular and des-
tined, it seemed, for some extraordi-
nary future—but they had all turned
out to be dull and conventional, and he
increasingly saw himself as dull and
conventional, too. Valente disagreed.
He thought that their classmates had
been deeply weird and had clung to the
idea that they were dull and conven-
tional to keep from sliding off the face
of the earth.
“Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You
tried to be the man in the gray plaid
suit, and you got fired for mouthing off
on one of those scam shows.”
This was only partly accurate. Jack,
on that fateful day, had been listening
to an overgrown child in what he be-
lieved were nonprescription glasses hy-
perventilate about the earnings figures
for a Chinese company that Tabor did
business with. While the man grew
practically breathless and goggle-eyed
at the company’s undervaluation, a
graphic overlay showing a buy-sell meter
flashed “Buy! Buy! Buy!”—and Jack,
exhausted by this prattle, sick of Tabor
and the expectation that he appear on
these shows, the little devil in Jack, with
an imperceptible smirk, said, “Well, yes,
if you believe those figures.”
It would have been a stretch, but
he could have told his bosses that he
had been confused about which com-
pany Tabor was working with. Not
particularly plausible, but they would