She was haunted, just as she'd feared, by the afterimage of his dick. She felt gladder and gladder that she hadn't let him put it in her. Brian had every advantage that she had, plus many of his own. He was male, he was rich, he was a born insider; he wasn't hampered by Lambert weirdnesses or strong opinions; he was an amateur with nothing to lose but throwaway money, and to succeed all he needed was a good idea and somebody else (namely her) to do the hard work. How lucky she'd been, in that hotel room, to recognize him as her adversary! Two more minutes and she would have disappeared. She would have become another facet of his really fun life, her beauty reflecting on his irresistibility, her talents redounding to his restaurant's glory. How lucky she'd been, how lucky.

She believed that if, when the Generator opened, reviewers paid more attention to the space than to the food, she would lose and Brian would win. And so she worked her ass off. She convection-roasted country ribs to brownness and cut them thin, along the grain, for presentation, reduced and darkened the kraut gravy to bring out its nutty, earthy, cabbagy, porky flavor, and arted up the plate with twin testicular new potatoes, a cluster of Brussels sprouts, and a spoon of stewed white beans that she lightly spiked with roasted garlic. She invented luxurious new white sausages. She matched a fennel relish, roasted potatoes, and good bitter wholesome rapini with fabulous pork chops that she bought direct from a sixties holdover organic farmer who did his own butchering and made his own deliveries. She took the guy to lunch and visited his farm in Lancaster County and met the hogs in question, examined their eclectic diet (boiled yams and chicken wings, acorns and chestnuts) and toured the soundproofed room where they were slaughtered. She extracted commitments from her old crew at Mare Scuro. She took former colleagues out on Brian's AmEx and sized up the local competition (most of it reassuringly undistinguished) and sampled desserts to see if anybody's pastry chef was worth stealing. She staged one-woman late-night force meat festivals. She made sauerkraut in five- gallon buckets in her basement. She made it with red cabbage and with shredded kale in cabbage juice, with juniper berries and black peppercorns. She hurried along the fermentation with hundred-watt bulbs.

Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. "I can't believe it! That's the whole point. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can't believe he didn't mention it."

"Explain to me what the problem is?"

"Rick Flamburg's disabled for life," Robin said. "My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on antipsychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W just did
for us, let's move to Mendocino!"

"But you didn't do anything wrong," Denise said. "You're not responsible for any of those other things."

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"

"I don't know."

"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning."

They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.

Robin ended Denise's moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. "Do you know what Jerry Schwartz's movie is about?"

"Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?"

"You know it. How come I didn't know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!"

"We're talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily- bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing," Denise said.

"My husband," Robin said, "has put fifty thousand dollars, which he got from the W—— Corporation, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women's skulls and goes to jail for it! He's getting off on how cool it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What's His Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist brother, who really did split somebody's skull —"

"No, I get it," Denise said. "There's a definite want of sensitivity there."

"I don't even think so," Robin said. "I think he's deeply pissed off with me and he doesn't even know it."

Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. "How often, in, like, a week," she said, "did you and Emile fool around?"

"I'm not the person to ask about what's normal," Denise answered. "I've mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror."

"I know. I know." Robin stared intensely at the blue TV screen. "But, what did you think was normal?"

"I guess, at the time, I had the sense," Denise said, telling herself large number, say a large number, "that maybe three times a week might be normal."

Robin sighed loudly. A square inch or two of her left knee rested against Denise's right knee. "Just tell me what you think is normal," she said.

"I think for some people, once a day feels right."

Robin spoke in a voice like an ice cube compressed between molars. "I might like that. That doesn't sound bad to me."

A numbing and prickling and burning broke out on the engaged portion of Denise's knee.

"I take it that's not how things are."

"Like twice a MONTH," Robin said through her teeth. "Twice a MONTH."

When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now. In hindsight, the week and a half she'd waited before Brian grabbed her had passed like a heartbeat.

And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold: Shit, she's really into me now. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance: She wants sex every day. This same part of her was thinking also: My God, the way she eats. And: I am not a "lesbian."

At the same time, another part of her was literally awash in desire. She'd never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she'd never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.

"Why is nobody ordering country ribs?" Denise asked Rob Zito. "Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?"

"Americans don't like sauerkraut," Zito said.

"The hell they don't. I've seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I've counted my eyelashes."

"It's possible we get some German nationals in here," Zito said. "German passport-holders may be responsible for those clean plates."

"Is it possible you don't like sauerkraut yourself?"

"It's an interesting food," Zito said.

Expensive people of a sort formerly scarce in Philadelphia were three-deep at the bar when Brian came by with a dozen roses. He hugged Denise and she lingered in his arms. She gave him a little bit of what men liked.

"We need more tables," she said. "Three fours and a six at a minimum. We need a full-time reservationist who knows how to screen. We need better parking-lot security. We need a pastry chef with more imagination and less attitude. Also think about replacing Rob with somebody from New York who can handle the kind of customer profile we're going to get."

Brian was surprised. "You want to do that to Rob?"

"He wouldn't push my ribs and sauerkraut," Denise said. "The Times liked my ribs and sauerkraut. I say fuck him if he can't do the job."

The hardness in her voice brought a glow to Brian's eyes. He seemed to like her like this.

She sat on a southbound train while rain-glazed local platforms flashed by at intercity speed. Her father at the lunch table had looked insane. And if he was losing his mind, it was possible that Enid had not been exaggerating her difficulties with him, possible that Alfred really was a mess who pulled himself together for his children, possible that Enid wasn't entirely the embarrassing nag and pestilence that Denise for twenty years had made her out to be, possible that Alfred's problems went deeper than having the wrong wife, possible that Enid's problems did not go much deeper than having the wrong husband, possible that Denise was more like Enid than she had ever dreamed. She listened to the pa-thum-pa-thum-pa-thump of wheels on track and watched the October sky darken. There might have been hope for her if she could have stayed on the train, but it was a short ride to Philly, and then she was back at work and had no time to think about anything until she went to the Axon road show with Gary and surprised herself by defending not only Alfred but Enid as well in the arguments that followed.