He sat in a daze sipping cranberry juice and mourning Keifetz. He should have paid him more. Why was he so stingy with everything? He remembered Keifetz’ uncle, an old dermatologist named Harry Lesion. Keifetz used to send the old man a hundred-dollar bill whenever he thought of it. He’d have Daisy dig out the old man’s address, Nick decided, and send him the raise Keifetz should have had. He got to the family flat at the Walpole on upper Madison at a quarter to six. He took a bath, left a call for seven thirty, and went to bed so he would be as fit as possible for an evening with Yvette Malone.***Yvette Malone was a lightly bruised woman of about thirty who had been trampled by a man named Malone in holy matrimony and who had been fleeing ever since to almost anywhere it was emotionally comfortable, because a love of emotional comfort was all she had been able to salvage out of a marriage that had happened ten years before, when she had been even more defenseless. She had married one of those men who are retroactively determined to fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain or to become the leading climber of the Sherpa people for the first conquest of Everest or to pitch four consecutive no-hit games in the 1928 series against the Yankees—almost anything superlative if it were fictional or unattainable.
