kitchen he’s got here, this cousin of yours.”
“Very nice,” I said. “A premium kitchen.”
“He doesn’t look old enough for an apartment this posh. Is there family money?” You blinked at me sweetly. “You’re not a fabulously wealthy recluse, are you, Walter?”
“A recluse? Not at all. Why would you ask me that?”
“I was watching you earlier, out in the living room. You were alphabetizing all the DVDs.”
“I don’t think of recluses as going to parties,” I said stiffly. “I tend to think of them as staying at home, in a bunker or a tower of some kind. And as for those DVDs—”
You gave my hand a squeeze. “Don’t get your shorts twisty, Walter. I’m sure the DVDs were frightfully out of order.” You watched me for a while. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the blue-eyed, moony type. Also, for the record, I’m sloshed.”
I considered pointing out that my eyes were a sort of muddy greenish gray, but prudence prevailed. Your expression grew pensive.
“Do you mind if I ask how you pay the rent?”
“I’m working on—I suppose you could call it a book.” I stared out at the forest of pant legs and skirts. “A book of history.”
“History, did you say?”
I nodded.
“Anybody’s history in particular?”
Talking about my book always made me want to commit seppuku, and this was no exception. I hadn’t so much as glanced at it since I’d dropped out of college.
“Mine,” I answered, fighting the urge to bark or gnash my teeth. “My family’s, I mean.”
To my infinite relief you didn’t laugh. “Your family? What’s special about them?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Which was the second lie I told you.
“I know what’s special about mine, Walter. Would you like to know?”
“Very much.”
“We’ve always had noteworthy tombstones. My great-great-uncle Elginbrodde—of the Massachusetts Elginbroddes—wrote his epitaph himself, and it’s a doozy. Want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“All right, then.” You screwed your eyes up fiercely. “It was etched in a kind of cursive, I remember. Let me think—
“ ‘Here lie I, Melvin Elginbrodde:—
Have Mercy on my Soul, Lord God,
As I would do, if I were God
And Ye were Melvin Elginbrodde.’ ”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. If I hadn’t already known that I was at your mercy, Mrs. Haven, I’d have realized it then.
“That’s quite an epitaph,” I said at last.
“I’d like to read your book one day, Mr. Tompkins.”
No one had ever told me that before—and no one has since. “You would?” I said. “Why?”
“Something tells me I’d like it.” You turned my hand over, as if reading my palm. “If we become friends, maybe I could have a walk-on part.”
“It’s not that kind of history,” I managed to answer, painfully aware of how pompous I sounded. “It starts almost a hundred years ago. I’m trying to make a sort of pilgrimage, you might say, back along the causal—”
“There must be money in your family.” You let go of my hand. “An apartment this hideous doesn’t come cheap.”
“Van came by his riches honorably, I’ll have you know. By the sweat of his loins.” I attempted a grin. “He has a mail-order pheromone business.”
Your eyes widened. “He has a what?”
I cleared my throat carefully. “He sells pheromones—”
“Has he got any here?”
“Here?” Something in your voice made me uneasy. “In this apartment, you mean?”
Your face was close enough to mine that I could feel your hopsy breath against my neck. “In this apartment,” you said, “is exactly what I mean.”
I felt suddenly exposed under your attention, undersized and at risk, like a chinchilla caught in a searchlight. I found myself wondering whether it hadn’t been a mistake to tell you about Van’s business. I was still trying to make up my mind as I followed you out of the kitchen and up the spiral staircase to the second floor.
“They’re probably in here,” you said, opening the door of what my cousin liked to call his “cockpit.” “This is where I’d keep the monkey drops.”
“Monkey drops?”
“The pheromones, Walter.”
You were already rifling through the drawer of Van’s night table. A vaguely pornographic poster above the headboard advertised something called Equus Special Blend: two women with airbrushed, lava-colored bodies caressing a man-sized vial of iridescent goo. I studied it for a while, trying to figure out why Van could possibly have had it framed, then recognized it as a poster for his company. The vial was sweating angrily and so were both the women. A banner of digital-looking text across their genitals proclaimed:
YOUR. TIME. IS. NOW.
“Your time is now,” you said quietly. You were standing at my shoulder, gazing up at the poster with a look that I couldn’t interpret. “Isn’t it always?”
“If that were true, Mrs. Haven, my cousin would be out of a job.” You sighed, and I realized—too late—that your expression was one of melancholy. “I only mean that, in this case, ‘your time’ is a reference to getting a girl—I mean, to finding somebody to—”
“It’s always now,” you said. “It’s never then.” You seemed to be speaking only to yourself. A second wave of jealousy broke over me, even more overpowering than the first. My sense of predestination was gone without a trace.
“I’d rather not talk about time, if you don’t mind.”
“Why not?”
“If you really want to know, Mrs. Haven—” I hesitated, at a loss as to where to begin. “You might say that time is my family curse.”
“Time is everyone’s curse.”
“That’s a popular misconception, actually. Without progressive time—that is to say, without what physicists refer to as the ‘thermodynamic arrow,’ life as
