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I retreated to the living room to watch TV. Sesame Street wasn’t on, the bastards, nor was my second-favorite show, Francis the Gnome. In lieu of Bert and Ernie’s bumbling monkeyshines, or Francis the Gnome’s less interesting but still entertaining good deeds, a man and a woman sat still at a desk and spoke of the world’s troubles. It was boring. Lydia made me switch off the TV when Tal arrived.

“Hello, Bruno,” she said when she entered our house, carrying in one hand a bottle of wine, and in the other—unsettlingly—a bouquet of green roses. She ruffled the fur on my head with her fingers. Lydia and Tal hugged in the entryway, and Tal, who before this I had known only as a figure of the sterile and controlled environment of the lab, suddenly entered our home, causing a disturbing collision of my two social worlds, the domestic and the professional. Lydia took the flowers from her, snipped their stems, and put them in water in a rinsed-out spaghetti sauce jar.

Tal opened the bottle of wine she had brought by twisting the wine-opening implement deep into the neck of the bottle and levering out the cork with a satisfying fump. She trickled the liquid rubies the bottle contained into two glasses, which Lydia and Tal then knocked together with a ceremonial ding, and then each woman respectively and simultaneously brought her glass to her lips and took a sip. Then they began to converse, many heads above me, in complicated language I could not disentangle.

Tal leaned back with her elbow on the kitchen counter and her glass of wine in her hand while Lydia put the final aesthetic touches on the meal she had made. Lydia asked me to please set the table for three. Setting the table was one of my regular chores. Ordinarily I would have set it for two. Ordinarily I would have placed two napkins before two of the chairs that faced each other diametrically across the dining table, and then placed upon each of the napkins the three standard eating tools, one beside the other from left to right in descending order of length: knife, fork, spoon; this was “setting the table.” Lydia had shown me how to do this, and ordinarily I delighted in the ritual. But tonight, on this particular night, I remember that for some reason I just listlessly dumped several napkins and a random clattering of silverware on the surface of the table, and then clambered sullenly atop the stack of phone books on my chair, slumped myself down, and awaited the meal with crossed arms. Lydia scowled at me.

“Don’t be a little snot,” she said, half under her breath, rearranging the napkins and silverware into proper formation. “We have company tonight.”

That evening Lydia had also arranged the atmosphere of the apartment in an unusual way. She lit several candles, these fat and weird-smelling cylinders of colored wax, which she then placed in the center of the table, and then turned off all the lights in the apartment except for the lamp in the corner of the room. The music was still playing from the stereo—which wasn’t usually the case when it was just me and Lydia eating dinner—though she turned down the dial until the music was playing at a decibel level that just barely registered in the spectrum of the consciously audible—not to be actively listened to, but to provide a melodious bed of sound upon which to cushion the conversation.

In the darkness I watched the three bright flames of the three candles on the table twitch and wobble, moving in and out of existence. Their light softly painted the faces of the two women from below in red and yellow tones, and the shadows of their heads shifted and danced on the walls and ceiling. Tal poured more wine, and the two of them raised their glasses. They looked at me, and I did likewise with my plastic sippy cup full of apple juice. We all knocked our drinking receptacles together in the airspace over the center of the table. The contact of their wineglasses made a high pretty note that chimed once and rolled around in the bowls of the glasses before vibrating away to