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anything that might fit my tall, skinny body.
    It was also a mistake to bring up the subject of couples around Deirdre. In terms of age, she lived in my untrendy, forty-something neighborhood and had been married to a homely, arrogant lawyer named Raymond for nearly twenty years. The central problem in her life (her version) was that she and Raymond were, and always had been, too compatible, too much in love, too damned happy. According to Deirdre, people snubbed you socially, condescended to you intellectually, and questioned the depth of your emotions if you were happily married. It didn’t help that she generally worked with divorcing couples funneled to her by Raymond.
    The man shook the rain out of his big black umbrella, held the door open for the woman in a courtly way, and the two entered. It was close to lunchtime and Deirdre and I were the only ones in our small office, one of the few independent real estate offices in town that hadn’t been gobbled up by a conglomerate.
    “Do you want to help them, or should I?” I asked Deirdre.
    “I was just about to go out and buy a soda,” she said, code for huddling in the alley behind the building and smoking. She pushed herself back from her desk. “You take them. I’m not in the mood to listen to them bragging about how close they are to divorce. You can deal with it better than I can, being single and all.”
    When it comes to dealing with gay colleagues, most people follow a Don’t Ask policy, as if posing a question about dating or romantic interests would be unacceptably invasive. In all the years I’d been working at Cambridge Properties, no one had ever questioned me about my social life, and although I was open with everyone in a general way, I’d never shared a detail of same, aside from occasionally dropping the name of a man I might be dating into a conversation, something that had never produced a single follow-up question. This situation made me feel inferior to my coworkers—a bit like a maiden aunt with no prospects—and oddly enough, simultaneously superior, as if I had a wildly sophisticated private life that was above the tedium of marital squabbles and framed photographs of smiling spouses.
    Being single and all, I took on the couple, and Deirdre went out for her Marlboro Ultra Light.

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    “We’re not looking aggressively,” the man said. “I should tell you that right off, just so you’ll know. I don’t want you to end up feeling you wasted your time with us.”
    We were standing in front of the empty reception desk near the door, and the man was having a tough time figuring out what to do with his dripping umbrella. Polite to a fault. An attractive fault. I like people who make an effort with the small details of everyday manners, holding open doors, not dripping all over your carpets, saying thank you for insignificant favors.
    I was convinced that manners were a dying, possibly dead art, the victim of talk radio and a growing suspicion that anything less than all-out bullying was an admission of weakness, an open invitation to telemarketers and suicide bombers.
    “Don’t worry about my time,” I said. “In the end, it’s a lot less work for me if you don’t buy anything. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
    He grinned at me. “I feel better already.”
    He was a good-looking man with the sculpted face of an aging runner. His graying hair was brushed straight back off his forehead and slicked down close to his scalp, the lines of the comb clearly delineated. He was dressed and groomed—a dark suit under the now-open raincoat and that arranged hair—as if he was about to appear in court or make an important presentation, and so I wasn’t surprised later when I learned that he was that profitable, nebulous thing, a business consultant. There was something in his manner—confidence mixed with empathic generosity—that made me certain he’d grown up with advantages he wasn’t afraid of having taken away from