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shouted. “I was talking to Kate.” Heath turned the water off.
    “Heath, are you bare naked?” Kate asked.
    “No,” said Heath. “I have my swim suit on.”
    “What color is it?”
    “Flesh,” said Heath.
    “We have to bring a potato to daycare,” said Kate.
    “What for?” asked David.
    “I don’t know,” said Kate. “For art.”
    “I don’t think I have any potatoes,” said David. “We’ll have to stop at the store.”
    “I want a big one,” said Kate. “Can I pick it out?”
    “You may,” said David. “Enough brushing.” He unarmed her. “Now spit.”
    Kate spat and studied the foamy design in the sink. This spit interpretation was a ritual step in her morning ablutions. “It looks like a fish eating popcorn,” she concluded.
    Heath emerged from the shower, a towel around his waist. “It looks more like a Jackson Pollock to me,” he said.
    “Go get dressed,” David said to Kate. “Your clothes are on your bed. If you need help, call me. What kind of juice do you want?”
    Kate thought for a moment. “Cran-raspberry,” she said. She turned on the tap, washed her art down the drain, and departed.
    David closed the bathroom door. “Was there enough hot water?” he asked.
    “Yes,” said Heath.
    David watched Heath dry himself. Heath’s body was slight and white and, to David, always surprisingly beautiful. The first time he had felt this unexpected attraction to Heath had been last December. The offices of Altitude were miserably overheated, and Heath had worn a loose-fitting, short-sleeved bowling shirt that had slid up his arm as he pointed to something—a man dancing with a small Christmas tree—on the roof of the opposite building. David looked at the dancing man, and for a brief perplexing moment he realized he wanted to be looking in the other direction: at Heath’s bare upper arm, at the shadow of hair he had glimpsed beneath it, at the whole elegant, upraised limb, but by the time he turned his head Heath had lowered his arm, the sleeve had descended, the hand was hidden in Heath’s pants pocket. So David had looked at Heath’s face, and Heath had looked at him.
    “What time is your lunch?” David asked.
    “One,” said Heath, who was finally having his lunch with Amanda Paine and Anton Shawangunk of the Gallery Shawangunk. “What do you think I should wear?”
    “I don’t know,” said David. “I don’t eat lunch in SoHo. Something black and groovy. Wear your sunglasses.”
    “I wish I smoked,” said Heath.
    “Daddy,” Kate called from her bedroom.
    “What?”
    “Are there boy potatoes and girl potatoes?”
    Lydia Aronso, David’s assistant, was the director of South Americans for Jesse Jackson (SAJEJA), a position that of late seemed to occupy most of her energies during the working day. She assured David that after the primary things would return to normal.
    “Hello, baby,” she said to David, when he arrived at his office. “If you want coffee, I have to send out. The coffee machine exploded.”
    “You know I don’t drink coffee,” said David. “I never drink coffee.”
    “You could have changed,” said Lydia. “There is a capacity inside each of us to change. And that’s how we’re going to change this country. And the only way this country will change is if Jesse Jackson is elected president…”
    “Please, Lydia, save it.”
    “But you’re uncommitted. You’ve said as much. You are an uncommitted Democratic voter. And therefore it is in your power to change this country.”
    The phone rang. Lydia picked it up. “Hi, Altitude ,” she said. She had to—it was a rule.
    David went into his office and opened his briefcase. Inside it was a large Idaho spud. “Shit,” he said. He picked up the potato.
    Lydia came into his office. “It’s the cartographer,” she said. “What’s with the potato?”
    “It’s Kate’s, for daycare.”
    “Aren’t you carrying this healthy snack thing a little too far?”
    “It’s for arts and