THE POWDER WAS DARK AND FINE, REALLY A DUST. It carried into the light in tobacco wisps as he loaded the chamber, packing it flat with the weight of his body, twisting the tamp before easing the pressure. A featureless surface remained. He locked the handle in place and started the pump. Two honeyed streams oozed from the filter head down to the shallow white cup.

The springs squealed. She leapt up from bed, the Ballade in D minor — Brahms, her favorite — following her out of the bedroom as she opened the door and darted to his side. He did not react. Her hands clung to the edge of the sink as she leaned over it, finding a way into the margins of his view as her bare breasts grazed the Bolognese-stained plates poking up out of dishwater, frothless now after three days of attrition.

He stared down into the filling cup. Without raising his head he looked at her. Blue eyes edged with green — they fluttered, fixed his own, released them, and fixed them again. He was unchanged. She swung her head away from him, tucked her chin in the hollow of her shoulder, and swung it back, her face now more flush with light just as cirrus draped the sun. He turned off the pump.

"We should take a trip," she said.

The crema was thinning already. She'd left an entire bag of beans, a Kenyan peaberry finer than her palate, to stale in the unlidded grinder.

He handed her the cup. She tasted it and made a face, crinkled her nose. "You make it bitter." She spooned too much sugar into the drink and sipped at the travesty.

"Why?" he asked as he refilled the basket.

"Why?"

"Then where."

"We could go to Sri Lanka. It's safe enough there now, right?" "I have what I need."

"Well then not for that." She shut her eyes in concentration or its imitation. "Réunion." The word came abruptly, eyes popping. She touched her thumb to her lip and tilted her head. "Dakar?"

"There might be things I could use back in England. More letters, maybe some journals. We could probably stay at the old house itself this time. If you really have to go somewhere."

"Dakar!" The eyes quivered — that, her manner of punctuation. "Isn't there art in Dakar?"

"In going there?"

"A biennial. I think. Oh, I need to know these things."

"Really, though, I shouldn't go anywhere. Not till I've written up these pieces up for the Wintry."

He pulled the second shot and smiled. The pump's din made conversation impossible, forcing her to wait the twenty-five ticks of his Submariner.

"But if you have everything you need, you can do it there." He paused, though without quite shaking his head. "And do you even have the time for this?"

"Too much. You know that. It is such a strange little place to work, Carl. There's hardly enough to do. Three issues. It's more like half a year's work. And just to go into that office — the six of us. Maybe you'd think, I did, that that would make things intimate, more informal. And it is informal, but not intimate. It's a vacuum. Silence from start to finish most days. And these are supposed to be people you'd actually wanted to work with. Really good readers. They write interesting stuff too, smart commentary. But in the flesh, they're false, or tepid, or humorless — or falsely so without alcohol, and even then, the jokes are mostly bad. Paper-interesting, that's what I'm calling them. Halsley's made them that, I think, if they weren't already."

He downed his espresso and set the cup on the surface