It wasn't calamitous. Vanessa hadn't been the first woman to indulge his taste in handmade shirts and silk waistcoats, nor would she be the last. But she was the first in recent memory—for Gentle the past had a way of evaporating after about ten years—who had conspired to remove everything from him in the space of half a day. His error was plain enough. He'd woken that morning, lying beside Vanessa with a hard-on she'd wanted him to pleasure her with, and had stupidly refused her, knowing he had a liaison with Marline that afternoon. How she'd discovered where he was unloading his balls was academic. She had, and that was that. He'd stepped out of the house at noon, believing the woman he'd left was devoted to him, and come home five hours later to find the house as it was now. He could be sentimental at the strangest times. As now, for instance, wandering through the empty rooms, collecting up the belongings she had felt obliged to leave for him: his address book, the clothes he'd bought with his own money as opposed to hers, his spare spectacles, his cigarettes. He hadn't loved Vanessa, but he had enjoyed the fourteen months they'd spent together here. She'd left a few more pieces of trash on the dining room floor, reminders of that time: a cluster of keys they'd never found doors to fit, instruction documents for a blender he'd burned out making midnight margaritas, a plastic bottle of massage oil. All in all, a pitiful collection, but he wasn't so self-deceiving as to believe their relationship had been much more than a sum of those parts. The question was—now that it was over—where was he to go and what was he to do? Martine was a middle-aged married woman, her husband a banker who spent three days of every week in Luxembourg, leaving her time to philander.