What was most real to her, after all, were the things she wanted.

“I’d like to talk,” Jena said. “Can we talk for a little first?”

“I was hoping we would,” Wales said. This was opaque enough. Perhaps he would tell her about the woman he’d seen killed on Ardmore.

“Come sit in this chair beside me.” She looked up, smiling. “We can watch the lights and talk. I missed you.”

He didn’t mind whatever he did with her; you could make a good evening in different ways. Making love would come along. Later they would walk out onto the wide, lighted Avenue in the cold and wind, and find dinner someplace. That would be excellent enough.

He sat between her and her worktable, where there were brushes, beakers of water and turpentine, tubes of pigment, pencils, erasers, swatches of felt cloth, razor blades, a vase containing three hyacinths. He had seen her paintings before—enlarged black-and-white photographs of a man and a woman, photographs from the nineteen-fifties. The people were nicely dressed, standing in the front yard of a small frame house in what seemed to be an open field. These were her parents. Jena had painted onto these photographs, giving the man and woman red or blue or green shadows around their bodies, smudging their faces, distorting them, making them look ugly but not comical. There was to be a series of these. They were depressing, Wales thought—unnecessary. “Bacon did this sort of thing first, of course,” Jena had said confidently. “He didn’t show his. But I’ll show mine.”

She took a long, red cashmere sweater off the back of her chair and put it on over her dress. The air was chilled by the window glass. It was exhilarating to be here, as though they were on the edge, waiting to jump.

Below them eight floors, the Drive was astream with cars—headlights and taillights—the lush apartments up the Gold Coast sumptuous and yellow-lit, though off-putting, inanimate. The pink gleam from the hotel’s sign discolored the deep night air above. The lake itself was like a lightless precipice. Lakes were dull, Wales thought. Drama-less. He’d grown up near the ocean, which was never a disappointment, never compromised.

“There’s something wonderful about the lake, isn’t there?” Jena said, leaning close to the glass. Tiny motes of moisture floated through the tinted air beyond.

“It’s always disappointing to me.”

“Oh, no,” Jena said sweetly and turned to smile at him. “I love the lake. It’s so comforting. It’s contained. I love Chicago, too.” She turned back and put her nose to the windowpane.