I’m rich. They treat me like royalty. It’s why I’m a painter,” Jena said. “They didn’t honor their duty to order the world in a responsible way. So I have to say things with my painting, because they didn’t.”

Perhaps all the time spent with children, he thought, making nothing into something, distorted your view. “But does it bother you,” he asked.

“No,” Jena said. “I’d like to put them in a novel, too. Do you think they would be believable in a novel?” She hoped to write a novel. She liked all media.

“I’m sure they would,” he said. And he thought: how difficult could it be to write a novel? So many did it. He liked novels because they dealt with the incommensurable, with the things that couldn’t be expressed any other way. What he did was so much the opposite. He dealt with things that happened. The wrapping of the Reichstag. The funeral of a phony princess. Failed actualities, with his reactions to make up for the failure.

Someone knocked loudly on the door at the end of the short, dark hallway, and then opened it. He’d forgotten to turn the lock.

“Housekee-ping?” a young woman’s bright voice spoke. A bar of yellow light entered the room from the corridor outside.

“No!” Jena said loudly, her face, so close to his, startled, sharply unpretty. Her mouth could look surprisingly cruel, though she wasn’t especially cruel that he had seen. “No housekeeping.”

“Housekee-ping?” the voice said again, happily. “Would you like to be your bed turned down?”

“No!” Jena shouted. “Not. No bed turned down.”

“Okay. Thank you.” The door clicked closed.

Jena sat for a moment in her chair, in the candlelight, as if she was very displeased. Her hands were clasped, her mouth tightly shut. He could sense her heart beating stern, insistent beats. He’d thought, naturally enough, that it was her husband. She must’ve thought so. And sometime, of course, it would be, long after it mattered. “Would you like to be your bed turned down?” she said ruefully.

He looked around the darkened room.