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By Root 1917 0

from a Third World country, walked in. The lights flickered on automatically, as did the exhaust fan. He was surprised to find an ordinary toilet, humiliated by its functionality, in front of him, but on the wall above the toilet was a small signed pencil drawing by Paul Klee, and near the washstand and toilet was a waist-high table on which were piled several books. At the top was a signed first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Beneath it were other signed editions of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Adrienne Rich’s Selected Poems, and T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, just the book to have around when you were scrubbing your hands. So far, he hadn’t seen books anywhere else in the house. Krumholtz washed up, splashing soapy water on his face before soiling the hand towels, and when he returned to the hallway, Ellie Mallard was standing in exactly the same spot where she had been before, smiling pensively, her right foot half raised and planted with the arch on her left leg, a dancer’s position. “Do you believe in angels?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, but I used to,” she said, proceeding down the hallway toward an open doorway. Krumholtz followed her and noticed a Bonazzi painting next to a Hockney—no, it wasn’t a Hockney, though it looked like one, with a nude male swimmer underwater—and a Dentinger, a Fabian, and a huge Dierking that went all the way up to the ceiling, the dirty-brown and grayish paint mixed in with what looked like rusted metal fragments expressive of terrible agony on an epic scale. When he turned the corner, he found himself in what appeared to be a master bathroom placed in the middle of the hallway with a large whirlpool bath built into the floor. Leaning back in the bathtub, with his eyes fixed on Krumholtz, was the winner, James Mallard.

“Ah, so at last you’re here,” Mallard said. “We thought you must have been a little lost, being late. As you were. What happened to you?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Krumholtz said, putting his notebook away.

“Oh, that’s all right.” Mallard stood up and stepped out of the whirlpool bath. He was quite magnificent, still in possession of a sculpted athlete’s body, classically muscled and proportioned. Somewhere else in this house, Krumholtz knew, would be a fully equipped gym and possibly a full-time personal trainer. “We wondered what had gone wrong with you,” Mallard muttered flatly, as if Krumholtz’s absence actually had been a matter of the greatest indifference. Without a trace of shyness, and still wet, Mallard stepped toward Krumholtz and shook his hand, hard. He had a strong wet grip and large, thick fingers. Having finished with the handshake, Mallard stepped backward toward a grooved section of wall, where he pressed a recessed button. Hot air came blowing out on him from louvers in the wall, drying his body as he pivoted, his arms held slightly up. Krumholtz glanced over at Mallard’s wife, who was gazing appreciatively at her husband. Like the gods, these people had no timidity or shame. “Darling,” Mallard said to his wife, “would you hand me a towel?”

She reached over for a red bath towel, with a JM monogram, and handed it to her husband, though not before giving him a peck on the cheek. Mallard dried the backs of his legs and his hair, still in full view of Krumholtz, whose hand was now sopping wet. After drying himself, Mallard tossed the bath towel onto the floor.

“Well,” he said. “How shall we conduct this interview? This little interview?”

“Perhaps in your den?” Krumholtz asked. “I have a digital recorder—”

“Wouldn’t you rather be doing something?” Mallard asked. “Something physical? Do you hunt? It’s deer season, and we could go hunting. Actually, no. Unfortunately for us, the light is going, and it’s too late in the day. We could go out tomorrow, if you wish.”

“Well, no, I don’t hunt,” Krumholtz said. Here I am, he thought, talking to this naked man, while his wife looks on.

“We could chop some wood,” Mallard said. “There’s time. We could do that.”

“But you’ve just washed. And I have to take notes.”

“You mean