THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 73
J
onah Valente had been an object
of amusement to Jack and his col-
lege classmates, and presumably
he had gone on being one to other
people ever since. An awkward, in-
tense, muscle-bound young man, the
sort you could imagine crashing
through a wall accidentally, he had had
the dim, muddled quality of students
recruited to play football at the school,
who either didn’t measure up academ-
ically or didn’t believe they did. Valente’s
claim to fame, what had made him a
figure on campus—one of that subset
of maybe fifty classmates who, pos-
sessing some extravagance of charac-
ter, defined the larger composite char-
acter by which the student body
understood itself—came from his hav-
ing abruptly quit football during soph-
omore year to take up painting, a pas-
sion he had developed apparently out
of the blue and with a single-minded
earnestness that embarrassed his more
sophisticated classmates, who knew to
disguise their sincerity. When Valente
left the football team, changed his
major, and began hanging out with a
group of druggy slackers who loitered
around the Visual Arts department
like sun-drunk flies, the school paper
ran a feature on his unusual transfor-
mation and he acquired the nickname
Beaux Arts. This got shortened to B.A.,
and then Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the
Baleen Whale, simply the Whale, and,
by a different route altogether, Picasso.
A year later, after spending the sum-
mer in Florence on a painting schol-
arship, Valente got kicked out of school.
According to rumors at the time, his
expulsion had to do with drugs, but
Valente maintained among his friends
that it was the school’s way of punish-
ing him for quitting football. Jack had
no basis for judgment. Nor did he re-
ally care. You knew very little about
your classmates in the end, their real
lives and disappointments and hopes,
and what you did know was mostly
hearsay, and often dubious and even
somewhat fantastical.
In the indolent, halcyon days before
graduation, Jack had thought about
Valente exactly once. He had been lying
completely stoned in a friend’s com-
mon room, gazing up at the crown
moldings, when he realized that peo-
ple called Valente “the Whale” not sim-
ply because of the association pattern
in certain words but in reference to the
story of Jonah. When this insight lit
up within him, it seemed to glow for
a minute with a profound and inartic-
ulable meaning. Then he forgot it, and
he probably would have forgotten
Valente, too, if years later he hadn’t
moved to the rural area where, accord-
ing to their mutual friend Daniel,
Valente lived at home with his mother.
Jack’s house was in the next county
over, half an hour away by car, but he
was a newcomer and he didn’t know
anyone else yet.
He had moved there with Sophie.
“Sophie’s choice,” he jokingly told peo-
ple. Really, they had both made the
choice. But then, shortly after buying
the house and leaving the city, he had,
in quick succession, lost his new job
and lost Sophie. She hadn’t left him
because of the job (at a large financial
firm), though she didn’t like his new
job or believe that he liked it. Appar-
ently, she didn’t like their new life in
the country, either. Sometimes she
called herself a journalist, but that wasn’t
quite right. She wrote—nonfiction, she
had a degree in it—but she picked up
magazine assignments infrequently and
had trouble finishing pieces. Some fire
was missing in her, she’d be the first to
admit. She bit off more than she could
chew, spent months diving deeply into
projects, then found herself paralyzed,
unable to write a word. Jack had long
ago stopped giving her advice. He sim-
ply assumed that he would earn the
money, and she would (or would not)
figure out how she wanted to spend
her time, and either way they would
have kids and a home, a garden, friends,
vacations, and so on. Buying the house
had taken the better part of a year. Then
in the space of four weeks everything
had collapsed.
Sophie said that her feelings for him
hadn’t changed, but she now under-
stood—it had surfaced inside her with
a force she could scarcely describe—
that something was wrong, wrong for
her, anyway, with the life they had laid
out before them, and if she didn’t get
out now she never would. Jack pointed
out that their new life had hardly begun.
But she was unshakable. “I know my-
self,” she said. “Once I settle in, once
we have a kid and the rest, I’ll neverleave.” She looked not exactly desper-
ate but as if she were drowning in a
substance his words were forcing her
beneath. “Please.” She placed her fin-
gers on his forearm. And he didn’t argue.
Better to give people space. Either they
came back to you, he reasoned, or they
disappeared into their own confusion
and misery. With people he didn’t like,
he thought of it as giving them enough
rope. With Sophie, it was the usual in-
decision, the usual flightiness. That’s
what he believed.T
he house was in Trevi, a small ham-
let upriver from the city, out past
the suburbs, picturesque and quaint (if
not quite as grand as its European
name), with Bradford pear trees all
along the main street, which in spring
so filled the roadway and the air with
petals that it resembled a snow scene.
A water tower bearing the town’s name
and stilted up on arachnid legs, with
water stains rusting its gray-blue paint,
dwarfed the two-story houses and brick
storefronts and shops. Years ago, some
local wag had christened this Trevi
Fountain, and more recently a group
of friends from a nearby college had
purchased a disused bank building in
the heart of town and opened a lunch
counter of the same name.
Trevi sat on the train line north of
the city and laid claim to the only stop
for twenty miles in either direction, and,
naturally, this brought a certain wealth
and cosmopolitanism you did not find
everywhere in the region, and certainly
not in Rock Basin, where Jonah Valente
lived with his mother. Initially, Jack had
planned to take the train to work. He
had been at Tabor Investments only a
short time when he was fired. Before
that, he had spent half a decade in the
D.A.’s office and seemed in line for a
political career. But he had burned out
on that life, or that’s what he said, any-
way, and in anticipation of starting a
family he had signed on for what he
believed would be a cushier position all
around. Perhaps his new employer didn’t
agree with this interpretation of his job,
because, as soon as he gave his bosses
a chance by making an impolitic re-
mark on a business-news show, they
had wasted little time firing him. No,
they had dangled the threat. He could
have fought to stay, but, instead, haughty