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particular project from the beginning. Maybe Adele lived in an ordinary American house, or had, when she was growing up. David knew she went out to Delaware on holidays to visit her sister, who lived there, doing David did not know what. His own family had been reduced over the years to his mother and his two sisters—and nowhere near enough money to keep any one of them. His mother lived in Paris, on the Avenue Haus-mann, in a “small” apartment that had a reception room large enough to stage a cocktail party for five hundred, if she should ever want to stage a cocktail party. She wouldn’t. His sisters were both married to investment bankers and living on the Main Line, in houses exactly like the one they had all grown up in. He was here at the bank, finding out, firsthand, how impossible it was to live decently and amass a safety net at the same time.
    He turned off the lights in his office. There were cleaning ladies who came through and turned the lights off, but for some reason he felt guilty for making them do what he could easily do himself. He went down the hall to Adele’s big desk and dropped the copies there. He went back out and down to the reception area, pulling his gloves on as he moved. It had been cold for a week and it was going to get colder.
    â€œI know what’s bothering you,” Anne had told him, when he’d gone out there to take her to lunch last month. “You’ve been there and done that. Your life looks exactly like your father’s. You’re drowning in boredom and at the very, very bottom of your soul, you think you’re going to hell. And I don’t mean that figuratively.”
    No, David thought, he didn’t mean it figuratively, either. There was a circle of hell Dante had failed to notice. It was the one full of old boys from Exeter and Hotchkiss and St. Paul’s, who had never for a moment thought beyond their own small circle of self-doubt, and yet who were constantly in danger of falling out of it, of not having the resources, of not being able to keep up.
    The phone began to ring almost as soon as he was in the elevator. He took it out of his pocket and switched it on. “Yeah,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
    â€œJust a little nervousness on my part,” Tony said, “and the simple fact that I’m ready to kill Charlotte, which is nothing new. What’s the word?”
    â€œAll bad.”
    â€œHow bad?”
    â€œYou’re looking at eight to fifteen thousand layoffs, more likely the latter. In the month before Christmas. As soon as possible.”
    â€œIt can’t be pushed back after the first of the year?”
    â€œNot if Price Heaven expects to survive. Which it shouldn’t, because even with the layoffs, they’re going to be on very shaky ground.”
    â€œHow exposed are we?”
    â€œWe’ve loaned them a total of two and a half billion dollars—not too bad, but not chump change, either.”
    â€œHow much of it do we lose if Price Heaven goes West?”
    â€œPretty much all of it. Oh, we do have some secured loans in the bunch, but not nearly enough. We’ve bought into way too much of their paper. I told you last July—”
    â€œI know, I know. Crap. The logic of this escapes me. Does the logic of this escape you?”
    â€œNot really,” David said. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. People have more money. They don’t want to buy discounted crap all the time—”
    â€œSome of them must. Not all of them have more money. We’ve got, what, nearly fifty million people who can’t afford health insurance? They have to buy their clothes somewhere. They can’t be going to Laura Ashley to do it.”
    â€œThere’s Wal-Mart. And Kmart. And Kmart has been in trouble for a long time. If you bring the prices down low enough to matter, you don’t have the margin you need to make any money. If you don’t