Lyle stood at the door of a restaurant, cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick he'd lifted from the little bowl when he paid the check. He no longer ate in the Exchange luncheon club, pleasant as it was, restricted to members and their guests, well run and comfortably appointed as it was, so capable the waiters, knowing one's name, so effortless the attentions of the washroom personnel, swift with towels, brilliant in the understated brushing of one's suit, actual blacks, convenient as it was, an elevator ride from the trading floor itself. He watched the old man standing in the sun, arms upright, one hand trembling. Then he moved into the lunchtime crowds, wondering if he'd somehow become too complex to enjoy a decent meal in attractive surroundings, served, a minute from the floor, by reasonably cheerful men.

Across Broadway, a few blocks north, Pammy stood in the sky lobby of the south tower of the World Trade Center, fighting the crowd that was pushing her away from an express elevator going down. She wanted to go down, although she worked on the eighty-third floor, because she was in the wrong building. This was the second time she'd come back from lunch and entered the south tower instead of the north. She would have to fight the lunch-hour mob in the sky lobby here, go down to the main floor, walk over to the north tower, take the express up to that seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby, fight more crowds, then take a local to eighty-three, panels vibrating. Trying to move sideways now, she realized someone nearby was staring into her face.

"It's Pam, isn'tit?”

"I don't, what.”

"Jeanette.”

"Actually no.”

"High school.”

"Jeanette.”

"How many years was that ago?”