"How did your deejay gig go? Was it okay?"
"It was a thing of beauty. All the adorable old swingers cut loose on the dance floor, even the ones in wheelchairs. One guy sort of rubbed me the wrong way. He was rude to a woman named Alice, and he asked me to play 'Lady Magowan's Nightmare,' which doesn't exist, as you probably know — "
"It's 'Lady Magowan's Dream.' Woody Herman."
"Good boy. The thing was, he had this terrible voice. It sounded like something out of hell! Anyhow, I didn't have the Woody Herman record, and he asked for the Bunny Berigan 'I Can't Get Started.' Which happened to be Rhoda's favorite record. What with my goofy ear hallucinations and all, it shook me up. I don't know why."
For a few minutes they concentrate on their plates.
Jack says, "What do you think, Henry?"
Henry tilts his head, auditing an inner voice. Scowling, he sets down his fork. The inner voice continues to demand his attention. He adjusts his shades and faces Jack. "In spite of everything you say, you still think like a cop."
Jack bridles at the suspicion that Henry is not paying him a compliment. "What do you mean by that?"
"Cops see differently than people who aren't cops. When a cop looks at someone, he wonders what he's guilty of. The possibility of innocence never enters his mind. To a longtime cop, a guy who's put in ten years or more, everyone who isn't a cop is guilty. Only most of them haven't been caught yet."
Henry has described the mind-set of dozens of men Jack once worked with. "Henry, how do you know about that?"
"I can see it in their eyes," Henry says. "That's the way policemen approach the world. You are a policeman."
Jack blurts out, "I am a coppiceman." Appalled, he blushes. "Sorry, that stupid phrase has been running around and around in my head, and it just popped out."
"Why don't we clear the dishes and start on Bleak House?"
When their few dishes have been stacked beside the sink, Jack takes the book from the far side of the table and follows Henry toward the living room, pausing on the way to glance, as he always does, at his friend's studio. A door with a large glass insert opens into a small, soundproofed chamber bristling with electronic equipment: the microphone and turntable back from Maxton's and reinstalled before Henry's well-padded, swiveling chair; a disc changer and matching digital-analog converter mount, close at hand, beside a mixing board and a massive tape recorder adjacent to the other, larger window, which looks into the kitchen. When Henry had been planning the studio, Rhoda requested the windows, because, she'd said, she wanted to be able to see him at work. There isn't a wire in sight. The entire studio has the disciplined neatness of the captain's quarters on a ship.
"Looks like you're going to work tonight," Jack says.
"I want to get two more Henry Shakes ready to send, and I'm working on something for a birthday salute to Lester Young and Charlie Parker."
"Were they born on the same day?"
"Close enough. August twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth. You know, I can't quite tell if you'll want the lights on or not."
"Let's turn them on," Jack says.
And so Henry Leyden switches on the two lamps beside the window, and Jack Sawyer moves to the overstuffed chair near the fireplace and turns on the tall lamp at one of its rounded arms and watches as his friend walks unerringly to the light just inside the front door and the ornate fixture alongside his own, his favorite resting place, the Mission-style sofa, clicking first one, then the other into life, then settles down onto the sofa with one leg stretched out along its length. Even, low light pervades the long room and swells into greater brightness around Jack's chair.
"Bleak House, by Charles Dickens," he says. He clears his throat. "Okay, Henry, we're off to the races."
"London. Michaelmas Term lately over," he reads, and marches into a world made of soot and mud. Muddy dogs, muddy horses, muddy people, a day without light. Soon he has reached the second paragraph: "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats."
His voice catches, and his mind temporarily drifts off-focus. What he is reading unhappily reminds him of French Landing, of Sumner Street and Chase Street, of the lights in the window of the Oak Tree Inn, the Thunder Five lurking in Nailhouse Row, and the gray ascent from the river, of Queen Street and Maxton's hedges, the little houses spreading out on grids, all of it choked by unseen fog; — which engulfs a battered NO TRESPASSING sign on the highway and swallows the Sand Bar and glides hungry and searching down the valleys.
"Sorry," he says. "I was just thinking — "