“Sorry,” Mary said. “I had some errands to run.”

Pauline eyed her. It would be Pauline’s way to say, No you didn’t. It would be Pauline’s way to refuse the decorum of the fib, to embrace the painful honesty. It would be her way to say, You just didn’t feel like having lunch with me. Which would have been true, of course. And no less embarrassing, regrettable, awkward, no less vigorously denied, because it was true.

But Pauline had another conversation to pursue. She lifted her hands and put them over the top of her typewriter, she scooted her chair as close as it could get, a familiar routine, so that her breasts were pressed against the keys. She mouthed something, a name-Mr. Someone-or-Other-and rolled her eyes and cocked her head toward the front of the room. “Adele,” she mouthed. Mary looked up, she couldn’t help it, toward the desk where Adele sat, her back to them, her dirty blond hair draped perfectly over her lovely shoulders. “Rita,” another girl from the office, “saw them both,” Pauline whispered. “At lunch.” She paused, her eyes joyous, her lips pursed, her cheeks drawn in, as if the piece of news were butterscotch in her mouth. “Adele was crying,” she added, only mouthing the words, or only speaking them with a breathless wheeze in place of where the words might have been. “Crying.” She pantomimed, dragging her own manicured finger down her cheek.

Pauline had a large face, a strong jaw, and blue eyes forever darting, gesturing, scanning the room, scanning the faces and the backs of passersby-salesmen, bosses, other girls from the secretarial pool-taking everything in with one set of eyes, avid and hungry, and then turning another set, triumphant, well satisfied, to Mary, leaning over her typewriter to report what she’d seen, a bit of gossip, a bit of outrage, a bit of indecorous truth (did you see the shine on his coat, the bad toupee, the yellowed tooth, the pimple, the belly she’s getting?), all of it the same to Pauline, all delightful to savor, all evidence to be used. Evidence of what, Mary sometimes wondered-of the decadence and the decay, the homeliness, the paucity of good intentions that plagued the world? Evidence that no one else’s life, despite whatever false appearances, was any better than her own.