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have to make a thorough examination of that!” he said, because he guessed that was what she wanted to hear.
    “Ah, ah, ah!” she said, and waved her finger no, but her eyes flashed yes like meteors, bridal white.
    It would be nice to see her tan lines. But he was tired, and what he wanted more than sex was something else, maybe to be seen and felt as well as he could see and feel.
    “I think you’ll be a good doctor,” Danielle said.
    Isidore didn’t have a chance to answer because James came back in with his hair still standing up and his eyes a bit teary, which he made no effort to hide. He sat down next to Isidore and grabbed him around the neck with the cold rolling off him like he’d just come out of a meat locker.
    “You all right, mate?” Isidore said.
    “Ahoy. Bring me the hogshead,” James said, pulling Isidore close to him and kissing his hair. “This here Jack Tar, Danielle, he’s going all the way. Don’t you worry, I’m looking after him. He’s got a world-class arm and I won’t let him waste it on men in tights that carry around wet feathers.”
    “What does that mean?” Danielle said, looking horrified.
    “He thinks he’s a poet,” James said. “He goes around reading Romantic poetry and writing poems!”
    “Don’t mind him,” Isidore said, “he has Osgood-Schlatter disease.”
    James laughed.
    “What is that?” Danielle said.
    “Doesn’t that typically affect the knees?” James said.
    “In rare cases it affects the brain. Apparently.”
    “I mean,” James said, “he’s the hard-luck kid with the world-class fastball and I can’t wait to see the World Series, that’s all. Now bring me the hogshead!”
      
    Joyce came back but would not speak to James. Isidore and James waited with the girls under the light of a dim and frozen lamppost to see what would happen, and if Joyce would soften up again, but she didn’t. She stared straight ahead until the bus came barreling in on tortured brakes, a hard and hardy machine lighting up the bleached asphalt from within, grinding salt under its wheels and boiling sulfur in its engine. It sat in gusts of white vapor from its own tailpipe, the lamplight shining on its black windshield.
    “I’ll call you,” James said.
    “Don’t bother,” Joyce said.
    Isidore walked the girls to the door of the bus and kissed Danielle courteously. “I had fun with you girls,” he said. “Thanks for making the trip, Danielle, you’re sweet.”
    “Never mind Joyce!” she said. “You call me! You make sure and call me!”
    “Maybe next month,” he said. “There’s a dance.”
    When the bus had roared off, they walked onto the bridge and James said, “Are you gonna call her?”
    “No. But Joyce did well. She really tried this time.”
    “Izzy?” James said seriously.
    “Yes?”
    “Do we have oranges in the room?”
    “Oranges? No. There might be some peanut butter left on one of the mousetraps, though.”
    “I think I have plague.”
    “You want to buy some orange juice?” Isidore said, looking around for a store. “Jesus, what time is it? It’s been dark since lunch. It’s like the North Pole.”
    The cold Charles River flowed under the bridge like the path of a nightmare down into darkness. Above the numb and dimly lit spires of Harvard, the moon was bright as a C sharp on a trumpet against the black sky. Harvard was a city upon a hill. Its ivy and polished windows and legion of janitors showed its power and its age. And he was a part of it. Of those to whom much is given, much is required, Kennedy had said. But the assholes at the other table could still fuck themselves, fucking cocksuckers, more was required of them than they would ever give.
      
    “How much do you honor the dream,” he wrote to Dennis. “Sorry if I was incoherent when you called. I was half-asleep,” he wrote. “Remember that I believe in you, okay? And remember,” he wrote, “if you have an emergency, the parking lot of the grocery store is the