He had been unable to get back to sleep until, feeling the chill of early morning, he had added the bedspread to the layer of blankets. Despite its smell of chemicals and heavy ironing, he had finally drifted into an uneasy rest. The first thing after prying himself out of bed was to look through the window at the wheels on his car. Then he stood for a long time under the hot water and steamed the sleepiness from his mind. Shaving helped, too, though in scraping the whiskers around his mustache he nicked a corner of his nostril. That was a bad place and it always irritated him to be careless enough to cut himself there: the blood vessels were near the surface and the little scraps of toilet paper kept coming off wet and red from the nick. He didn’t want to go into the restaurant with either blood dripping down his face or a flag of paper waving from his nose, so he ignored the angry rumble of his stomach and started the first telephone call from the list he had formulated while tossing back and forth during the night.
