He did so, smiling to be naughty. "I'm going to go in there with a good att.i.tude," he pledged, watching her. "Even if I'm the worst of everyone."

"Be open to everything, listen carefully to what they're saying. And if someone says something mean, don't let them see you're upset. Just let it pa.s.s through you."

He nodded vigorously.

"They'll worship you," she said. "They all should. And if they don't they're morons! Must run, Mac. You must, and I must."

Throughout her afternoon with Humphrey-another needy male, this one at the opposite end of his life-she dearly hoped all went well for Mac. What an ache: consequences where you are of no consequence.

That evening, Duncan dragged Tooly into the TV room for company and vented at MSNBC.

"Speaking of phonies," she said, to divert his rage, "I was stretching my legs at the Coney Island boardwalk the other day and saw that big roller coaster. Made me think of Emerson."

"Why did the Cyclone remind you of Emerson?"

"Wasn't he doing a doctorate on the hermeneutics of roller coasters or something?"

"How do you remember this stuff?"

She had searched for Emerson online, and found him on a list of compet.i.tors at a triathlon in Coeur d'Alene, described as a college professor. She still felt lousy at having lost her friendship with Noeline. But she'd never known the woman's last name, so had no way of finding her online. Tooly had had so few female friends; perhaps it was having been raised by men. But she had come to wish now for female companionship, for a best friend as others had. It seemed to be beyond her.

"Poor Noeline," she said. "That was one relationship that was going to end badly."

"Actually," Duncan said, "they're married now." He held up his iPhone, swiping through pictures of Emerson and Noeline with their three kids at a cookout in Idaho, where they both taught college. They'd had a personal tragedy a few years earlier, when a disgruntled janitor opened fire at their child's nursery school, wounding four people and killing one, their son. Duncan had heard through mutual acquaintances, and got back in touch.

"The kids in the photo?"

"Adopted. They ended up adopting after that."

Tooly required a minute to absorb this story, to mesh it with her scorn of Emerson, which seemed callous now. Duncan muted the television.

"And Xavi?" she ventured. "I always thought he'd do something amazing. But I've Googled him, and all I get is some middle-aged white guy with a mustache in Ireland."

"Definitely not Xavi."

"No, I figured. Did he go back to Uganda?"

Duncan sighed. "I realize you don't know any of this."

"Any of what?"

"Xavi died."

The summer after business school, Xavi had co-founded a digital-rights-management start-up. But when the project stalled he'd accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs. He was still dedicated to entrepreneurship, but planned to work his way up at Goldman first, then use contacts to go it alone. After health coverage for the new job kicked in, he visited a doctor about a few nagging problems-he'd had no insurance since B-school, so had delayed the checkup for ages. They found a tumor: testicular cancer.

His plan was to undergo radiation and chemo without telling anyone at the job. He worried how they'd perceive him if they knew-as an African, he already stood out. So he fitted the treatment around his work schedule, taking the chemo drip at dawn, using vacation days to undergo the first surgery. No one at Goldman found out for months. Incredibly, he became a star there. "This was during that weird post-9/11 haze in New York," Duncan noted. "A few friends that he told about the diagnosis didn't know how to respond-couldn't absorb more scary news. A bunch faded away, especially when he got sicker. A lot of people saying, 'Lance Armstrong got over it!' Which was not helpful."

Finally, Xavi collapsed at the office and awoke in a hospital. The cancer had metastasized to his lungs, liver, bones. There was no hiding the condition now. When further treatment failed, the oncologist stopped returning his calls. Xavi grew sullen, and came to irrationally suspect that living in the United States had somehow provoked this illness. Duncan recalled Xavi sitting for his umpteenth chemo infusion, watching a debate on CNN about the proposed invasion of Iraq. The military campaign was being promoted by men decades older than Xavi, people who aimed to shape the future, while he would never even know how the conflict came out. "Emerson and Noeline visited once, but it ended uncomfortably. They spent the whole time arguing with him about the case for war."

"Xavi was for invading?" Tooly guessed. "They were against?"

"The opposite. Emerson and Noeline thought it was a just war."

One day at the hospital, Duncan caught sight of a familiar figure: the old man he'd met three years earlier, after Tooly had disappeared and he and Xavi had gone looking for her using her map. Humphrey was there for a hernia operation. When he heard about Xavi, he insisted on wishing him well. Later, after healing from his procedure, Humphrey returned to the hospital with a chessboard, recalling that he and Xavi had played during their sole encounter. But chess wasn't conceivable-Xavi was in intensive care then. Humphrey kept trying, even going to the hospice. "He used to sit in the water garden, alone with his rolled-up chessboard. Made cups of Nescafe for everybody. He'd go home, come back the next day. That's partly why I helped your dad."

"You told me before that you met Humph while visiting 'someone' at the hospital. Why didn't you just say it was Xavi?"

"Because I don't talk about this normally. He asked me not to."

Xavi wanted n.o.body to learn of his decline, even his family in Uganda. It was better, he decided, that they believe he had abandoned them for glories in America than learn of this. He wanted nothing posted online about his illness, no health updates emailed to business-school cla.s.smates or Goldman colleagues, no photos of his dwindling self, in order that he exist only in preceding memories. He made Duncan promise never to hold a memorial service, as if dying before success were a public disgrace. Xavi never did see the end of the Iraq War; he died at the peak of the pandemonium there, though he'd stopped caring, having receded from the world in stages: aware of just the hospice, then just his room, then his bed, then his body, then nothing.

THE REVELATION HAUNTED Tooly all night, and the following morning, too. For some reason, it made her want Mac nearby. So, for this one occasion, she combined her two obligations, him and Humphrey, taking the boy all the way to south Brooklyn and skipping his dreaded sports course at the Y (wrestling that day).

As they approached Humphrey's room, the hallway shuddered at music coming from the adjacent door. After introducing Mac to Humphrey, she excused herself to visit the neighbor. An acrid drug stench came from in there. The woman responded through her closed door. "What you want?"

"Just wondering," Tooly called back, "if you could turn it down a bit! My father next door doesn't hear well!"

"What?"

"It's impossible for him to hear!"

The music cut out. "Too loud for you?" the woman asked. Then she cranked it even louder.

This was awful timing, since Humphrey seemed to be relishing his new acquaintance, already showing Mac various books-it was the clearest Humphrey had been since her first day here. Indeed, it was he who shouted into her ear about getting ice cream.

"Let me go fetch some," Tooly said.

"I can." He hadn't left the building in weeks.

"We'll all go together."

So Humphrey and Mac plodded along Sheepshead Bay Road, she monitoring the old man's equilibrium, ready to lunge and catch him. He barely noticed her, engaged in a marvelous gab with the boy. It occurred to Tooly that each of these two was oblivious to the other's reputation, therefore took him seriously. Plus, Humphrey was wonderful with kids. And Mac, unaccustomed to such attention, sought to merit it, speaking in full sentences rather than swallowing his meaning halfway.

At the Baskin-Robbins, Humphrey bellied up to the display gla.s.s, peering blindly at the buckets of ice cream. "Can you see all right?" she whispered, but he waved her away, to discuss with Mac the relative merits of mint chocolate chip and pink bubblegum. The boy chose a single scoop, watching wide-eyed as Humphrey took the banana split.

"What about you?" Mac asked Tooly, which made her smile-he spoke as if he were treating.

"Very happy to watch."

So she was: Mac speed-licking to avoid drips falling on his hand; Humphrey with his long spoon, operating with much concentration, much spillage, and much exercise of puckery lips. Two little boys, she thought.

"Very cold on my teeth," Mac observed.

"Hmm," confirmed Humphrey, who had few teeth left. "I try not to bite down." He took pains to compose each bite, a process so fiddly that each took a tantalizing minute, his mouth opening thirty seconds early, theirs watering from suspense.

Humphrey insisted on paying-absolutely insisted! But he struggled with the indistinct green bills (she had slipped cash into his pocket before they left). He squinted at the pimpled cashier, at the bills, then handed them all over, saying, "Take it." The cashier proved honest-it always surprised Tooly that most people were.

The afternoon was a success and, upon their return, even the music next door had stopped. But, despite herself, Tooly felt slightly hurt: around a stranger, Humphrey had pulled himself together and was lucid at times, even making little jokes.

Back in Darien, she deposited Mac before the Xbox and sneaked downstairs for a moment alone. But Bridget was there, standing by the closed washing machine. She inquired how their jaunt to Brooklyn had gone. Then-without transition-said how unhappy she was in her marriage.

"Duncan is an old friend," Tooly interrupted. "I'm not who you should discuss this with."

But Bridget couldn't be stopped. She and Duncan had no romantic life whatsoever, she said, and he was in denial about it. They'd become like bunkmates. Though, even bunkmates interacted. Her eyes filled with tears to hear aloud her piteous state. "And," she joked, with a plucky sniff, "he sleeps right in the middle of the mattress, so I'm all scrunched up at the edge!"

"What happens when you talk to him about it? Not about the mattress. Things in general, I mean."

"On the few occasions I tried, he changes topic. To his p.i.s.sed-off politics. Or he goes into conference with his BlackBerry. Does this thing where he, like, angles himself in bed when he's reading his Kindle, so I literally cannot see his eyes, and he goes, 'Mmmmmm?' It's the present/absent."

"The present/absent?"

"Where someone's present but they're absent. Talking to you but looking at the screen."

"He's probably exhausted. He works insane amounts, Bridget."

"I know. I know. And I do totally love him still. But I feel like-what's the word?-like I'm withering. Already after having the kids, I turned into this ogre. It took me, like, four years to regain a familiar shape. And now I ... Thing is, I have this feeling if I go full-time at the office-and they've asked me to-something bad will happen."

"Meaning?"

"Maybe I'll meet someone there," she said, looking up testingly. "I want to be in love with someone again. I so miss that feeling. Thinking of someone when they're not there-you know? Like you have with Garry."

Tooly almost corrected that fantasy, but it was best to end such confidences, which seemed to affect Bridget dangerously. "Nothing's happened at your office yet," Tooly said.

"Heavens, no. How could I even find time for an affair? I haven't even seen my hairdresser in two months."

"That's your answer-have an affair with the hairdresser."

"There's the dream. Free highlights."

Each went her separate way, though Bridget dashed back downstairs a few minutes later to reiterate, "Obviously, I'm never going to do anything."

Poor Duncan. Because, Tooly suspected, Bridget was going to stray. She hadn't sought an opinion; she'd sought to desensitize herself to what already captivated her. If Bridget were to wander, Mac would be crushed. His mother was the only family member who was devoted to him.

Bridget must have found time for her hairdresser after all, because she came home with a shorter cut, rather like Tooly's. When Duncan returned that evening, he asked Mac, "What do you think of Mom without hair?"

"Uhm ..." The boy showed both palms, weighing like a scale. He gave a nervous snicker. Whenever Mac found himself in awkward situations, he gave this snicker, which was utterly unconvincing, thereby earning Tooly's sympathy. The ability to laugh when a joke was not funny had unexpected value; it produced a different life. She'd never had the skill, either. Still, Mac was an extremely considerate young man, and she made a mental note to mention this to Duncan. She was always looking for ways to praise the boy to his father. But it wasn't her job to mend that relationship. Would Mac even remember this when grown? What would he do when his father needed caring for? He'd dote on Duncan. There was no balance in relationships, much as people sought it.

In the McGrory household, there was symmetry at least in the bas.e.m.e.nt confessional. For it was Duncan who later cornered Tooly by the washing machine and told her more than she wanted to know, an admission that had nothing to do with love. "He's not down here?" Duncan asked, entering the music room, where she sat practicing her ukulele.

She stilled the vibrating strings. "Mac? Not that I've seen."

"Grrr." Duncan stood there, hands on hips, shaking his head at the electric piano. Among the causes of household tensions was Mac's failure to practice. They paid for weekly keyboard lessons, yet, in Duncan's view, the kid didn't make the slightest effort.

"You don't practice anymore, either," she noted.

"I don't have time. He has time." Duncan picked off the floor her copy of Nicholas Nickleby, which she'd been dragging back and forth to Sheepshead Bay, rereading it on the lengthy train rides. "Thing weighs ten pounds," he exclaimed. "Stop messing around and buy an e-reader. Screens won, my friend."

"Are you at a loose end right now, so decided to come and provoke me?"

"Pretty much," he said. "It just gets me that he has this opportunity and doesn't use it. My old Yamaha is awesome. I got them to hook it up to the house network, too, so you can track every practice session. Which is why it's so dumb when he pretends to practice. I can see on the computer that he hasn't."

"What a pain you must be."

"I know," he said, looking at her. "Am I a total jerk here?"

"You're one of the good guys, as far as I'm concerned. You looked after Humph. You're letting me stay here for nothing."

"At the cost of making you chauffeur my kid."

"True. You're a horrible person after all."

"Actually, could I tell you something? Not for repeating. I'm serious. Not to anyone. Ever." Lowering his voice, he said that he should probably do more with his son, that Bridget pestered him to, that he ought to, and he knew it. "But ..." He looked away. He exhaled. "Problem is ..." He shook his head. "The thing is that I don't like him," Duncan blurted. "Just fundamentally do not like this person. Aargh! Makes me sick to say it out loud. But it's true. I dislike him. Not his fault, poor kid. I feel unbelievably s.h.i.tty saying this. You can never repeat this. Ever. I mean that." He paced. "Have I shocked you?"

"I'm not shocked. You know me."

"Isn't his fault. Really not. I feel sorry for him. But whenever he's in the room," Duncan went on, gaining momentum, "I fundamentally do. Not. Like this person." He turned his back, flipped the pages of her novel. "Never occurred to me, when Bridget and I were trying to have kids, that you might not like your own child. It's the last taboo."

"The last taboo? Still reasonably taboo to be a cannibal or a necrophiliac."

"You're not getting my point."

"I am, Duncan. Just avoiding it a bit, I guess. I've never been in your position. But I don't find it that surprising. There are so few people on earth one really clicks with. I know it's supposed to be biological. But each kid has his own personality, which I suspect parents don't consider beforehand. They imagine a pet. Some of them do. Not saying you did. But it'd be amazing if one just blindly adored that person. I know that's what society says parents do. So, no, I don't find it shocking."

"You don't get it," he said. "When you have kids, you do automatically love them. It's biological."

"You're the one telling me that's not true."

"No-I do love him. Just don't think I like him."

"How old is he? Eight? Can you even make that statement yet?"

"You don't get it."

"If you keep telling me I don't get anything, it leaves me without much to say."

"Will you have kids?"

"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."

"As a parent?"

"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."

"You'll find it's kind of tough to canva.s.s the opinion of sperm."

"I prefer asking the eggs-they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"

"Exactly why decent people need to have kids."