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He raised the martini, thoughtfully sipping it, studying the side of Mabel’s face.

The table was dazzlingly bright, like a field of ice and snow: crystal glasses, cut-glass candlesticks, gleaming china and silverware, pure white linen napkins and tablecloth. He thought of the communion table of his childhood. Steam poured up from the serving dishes or formed droplets on their shiny lids.

Mickelsson discovered, not exactly to his surprise, that Jessica had been placed beside him. He would be conscious all through dinner of not brushing against her arm. Jessica handled the seating arrangement well, he’d have to grant. She smiled like an old friend from Boy Scout camp, delighted to be placed where she was, and made small talk, once or twice touching his forearm as she parried some bullying Mickelssonian joke. As quickly as possible—as if to take the pressure off him, sensing the confusion he felt in her presence—she turned her attention to Phil Bryant, seated to her left, asking him with just the right shade of interest about his year abroad. One could feel the charge she carried, some intense native energy; but at the moment she had it closed in, securely capped. He was conscious of how large they were, Jessica and he, in comparison to the others, except for Bryant. It made him ask, when she turned to him again, if she’d ever done anything in athletics. “Only Rugby,” she said, giving him a smile and a slow wink, as if she’d read his mind. Then she turned back to Bryant. (Fucking little tease, he thought.) Once the side of Mickelsson’s knee touched hers, and they both drew back quickly, Jessica giving him a glance, then smiling.

The Swisson woman—he managed to catch her name now, Katie—was to Mickelsson’s right. She held her fork daintily, as if fearfully, like an astonished bird invited to dine with tomcats. She looked up with exaggerated interest, head tipped meekly sideways, whenever anyone spoke her name, asking for her plate, passing asparagus, pouring wine into her glass. To make her feel less a spectator, Mickelsson inquired, “You have children, Ms. Swisson?”

She shook her head, chewing, trying to swallow quickly.

He told her about his son at U.V.M., excellent photographer—perhaps she’d heard of him? (it was impossible, in fact)—and his daughter Leslie, taking classes at Brown, though a highschool senior, planning to enter McGill next year to study French. He glanced at Jessica. If he was behaving like a fool she hadn’t noticed. She was deep in conversation with Phil Bryant and Gretchen Blickstein. Yet the back of her head struck him as alert and too still, as if she were eavesdropping on his talk.

“French! How interesting!” Kate Swisson said, looking up at him, wide-eyed.

Mickelsson shook his head. “You know what it means,” he said, mock-morose. “She’ll go off to Paris and fall in love with some miserable Frog and that’s the last I’ll see of her.”

She laughed, large eyes grown larger. It struck him that, though he’d meant it as a joke, he’d spoken with some vehemence, as if in fact he were furious with his daughter, not to mention the French. He wondered if it were so—that he was angry at his daughter, that is. It was true that she never phoned, kept losing his number. Like her mother, she was congenitally disorganized. He could phone her, but the chance that Ellen might answer put him off. He realized that the table had fallen silent and said, to cover himself, “It’s surprising how close you can feel to a daughter, and how little you really know her.”

“Peter! You, a man, expectin to understand women?” Edie Bryant cried out, across from him, brandishing her fork. Her eyes sparkled like the cut-glass candlesticks. “Perhaps shortly after the Second Coming!”

“Why, Edie,” her husband said, to Jessica’s left, his voice even more than usually melodious (he was fond of quoting Shakespeare, and his fifty-year-old Yale songs could make a turnip cry), “you surprise me!” He paused just an instant, then added, “Again!”

They all laughed, even Mickelsson, as if it were a wonderful piece of wit. He wondered, inwardly tumbling toward darkness, if it were possible that they all laughed, as he did, from politeness hiding disgust. It didn’t seem so, he thought, furtively glancing around the table—though certainly it had to be politeness with old Meyerson, who never heard anything anymore, not even the town’s many churchbells, against which he’d once lodged complaints. He sat next to Gretchen Blickstein at the foot of the table, wheezily laughing with his eyes shut. His wife, beside him, watching him like a hawk, suddenly dabbed at the corner of his mouth with her napkin. He pulled angrily away and said something in German.

“Don’t worry,” Jessica said, sotto voce, speaking past food, “she’ll hate it at McGill. Believe me! She’s like you.” She touched the corner of her mouth with her napkin.

“Like me?” Jessica and his daughter had never met.

“Intuition,” she said; “maybe a little simple deduction.” She smiled, then suddenly returned her attention to the conversation to her left.

Dinner wore on, painfully like every other dinner he’d ever been to, here, in Providence, in California, in Ohio: predictable compliments, jokes, earnest fragments of discussion, the usual little flashes of sexuality or annoyance between husbands and wives, husbands and other husbands’ wives; the usual spilled wine and quickly poured salt; the usual sudden, deep pauses. For a time Mickelsson was free to let his mind drift. Blickstein, to her right, had taken over conversation with Kate Swisson, bending over his folded hands toward her big, frightened eyes, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, the chandelier and candlesticks reflected in the lenses of his glasses. Mickelsson found himself musing idly on the curious distance between this world and the world he’d be driving back to later tonight: here fine clothes bought in New York or London or at very least Fowler’s Department Store in the local mall; there in the mountains … The image of John Pearson rose again in his mind:

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