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don’t even see her. Last night, for instance. When I knew I’d be at the office late, rewriting her speech for the AMA convention in Pittsburgh. I needed to run a new idea by her on health care. I needed ten minutes, no more, but her secretary kept phoning and postponing, phoning and postponing, until it was seven o’clock before I got in to see her. She was at her desk, two aides waiting for her signature, her assistant on the phone. Her damn husband in the corner with his overcoat in his lap. Right away he snaps, “You can have two minutes with her. Not a minute more. We’re already late for dinner.’ And I blew up. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, ‘Look. I am going to be here until midnight, if I’m lucky, and I’ll be ordering pizza, so don’t accuse me of wasting your wife’s time.’ That shut him up. The ass. He sat there like a lamb while I went over my outline with Kathleen.”
    I waited for her to laugh at this overreaction too, or explain the office psychology involved. The husband sounded obnoxious, but hardly criminal. “You said that to him?”
    She chewed and swallowed. “No. But I wanted to. God, did I want to. He really burned me.” She gave herself a derisive snort. “What did I tell you, Ralph? An institutional liar. I’ve been telling myself the should-have-said version so much that I’ve begun to believe it. But you need the ballast of bullshit to hold your own here. The bullshit has entered my soul.”
    “Sounds like you need a vacation,” I said worriedly.
    “Except I’ve become such a workaholic that I’d go to pieces without the routine to hold me together. I’d lie in bed and never get up. Instead, I lie in restaurants.”
    Nancy’s attitude toward the truth was always stricter than mine. I did not feel superior over getting the real story. And I did not think she’d lost her soul. She was in the thick of it and I wasn’t. I didn’t feel like a child in her presence, but I somehow felt shorter. When we finished dinner and got up to go, I was surprised to rediscover I was taller than Nancy.
    “I should tell you,” I said when we were back on the street. “I admire what you’re doing. The world seems so out there to me. Sealed up in itself. More black-box technology. But you work inside the box. I respect you for that.”
    She shook her head. “Uh-uh, Ralph. It’s nothing but boxes within boxes, all the way in. I’m in just deep enough to forget private life. Which is why I need to spend time with you.”
    “Who’s nothing but private life?”
    She laughed. “It’s a dirty job. But somebody has to do it.”

3
    B ACK AT THE APARTMENT , I made a pot of tea and Nancy changed into a calico nightshirt. We sat facing each other on her sofa.
    “City of bald heads,” I said, pointing out the Capitol.
    “Then you should feel right at home,” she teased. “Except I have to say, I see it as a big white breast.” She smiled and blew at her tea. She seemed relaxed, as if she’d unloaded a demon or two at dinner. “So how are you these days?” she asked.
    “Fine. I’ve been oddly content this fall.”
    “Love and work?” There was a tiny note of skepticism.
    “I have the bookstore. I have my friends.” I squeezed her knee through her nightshirt.
    “I don’t know, Ralph. If it were me, I’d find those weak substitutes. You’re not seeing anyone?”
    “I’m having a quiet time right now.”
    “Not even your annual office romance?”
    I laughed. “Those were in the spring. And I can’t do that anymore since they promoted me. Just as well. The new kids are too young and insipid to interest me.”
    “You haven’t been involved with anyone since Alberto first went into the hospital.”
    “Bert was never a boyfriend.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I did. “No. My quiet has nothing to do with that.”
    “But it must be affecting you. One person after another. It never ends, does it?”
    “You get used to it,” I said. “I know how awful that sounds,