At eleven forty-five, restless and irritable, Sanders broke early for lunch and headed outside to the narrow patch of concrete the hotel’s website designated the “rear patio.” Its umbrella-shaded wooden tables were bolted to the concrete, as were the four chairs that flanked each table at points of the compass: adequate for lunching with one or two or three friends, but more gregarious sorts were out of luck. Accessible only through an unmarked door halfway down a corridor of meeting rooms the patio was seldom used and forgotten even by the maintenance staff, who allowed pine straw to accumulate unswept for days at a time and unseasonable flowers to wither in their whisky-barrel pots. The tables by the pool were nicer anyway, and (poolside tables being, one supposed, a less tempting target for larceny) freely moveable to accommodate social groupings of all sizes. But the desolation of the rear patio was what attracted Sanders; it was, most days, the only place in the hotel he could think.

Beyond the patio and a thin curtain of pines was a golf course, on which Sanders and his colleagues, being not guests of the hotel but mere tenants and lacking, moreover, both tee times and proper footwear, were not permitted to walk. In ignorance of this rule and of the game of golf generally he once attempted a stroll through the rough along the fourteenth fairway, and near the green was met by a security guard who escorted him from the premises. To be escorted from premises is always embarrassing, but far more so when the escort is wearing golf shoes and a sunny yellow shirt with an embroidered lemur. The guard’s attire implied that Sanders was only a very minor threat, an irritant to be swatted casually away before the ice had melted in the whiskey sour that sat sweating for him on the bar in the Nineteenth Hole. Worse, upon undressing that evening Sanders discovered that a tick had attached itself to his groin, a stowaway he presumed from the pine straw that mulched the woods bordering the golf course. On Sanders’ rich Type O it had swollen to a thumbtack’s head and had to be removed, unpleasantly, with tweezers. The black dot of its body swirled down into the sewage pipes of Sanders’ apartment, but its spirit remained as a red welt that itched for two weeks inside its host’s underwear.

Duly chastened and disinclined to forget a lesson learned, Sanders confined himself to his strip of concrete, ate his tuna sandwich, watched the meandering parade of golf carts. Good theater, golfers. Bad golfers especially. A lone sportsman (male, thirties, khaki shorts, blue polo with unreadable corporate logo) dulled the electric whine of his ride, climbed from his vinyl perch, selected a club, strode confidently to the ball and topped it badly. The white orb skittered into the pine straw. Even Sanders, who had never set foot on a fairway with clubs in hand and whose understanding of the game derived exclusively from rainy Sunday afternoons when his channel-flipping paused momentarily on the hushed commentary of some Open or other — even Sanders could diagnose this miss; he wanted to call out to the man to keep your head down! But there seemed to be a great many unposted rules of golf etiquette and Sanders guessed that anonymously volunteered criticism, however well intentioned, would violate several of them. Even ensconced on his patio he dared not risk another confrontation with course security. So he stayed mum, and focused his attention on a butterfly while the golfer angrily hacked his way out of the woods.

Sunday in the park with Madison and the boys swarmed the playground like ants on a cupcake. They threw mulch; they shrieked gleeful insults; they chased one another with sticks which they pretended were guns or swords or, if they were particularly unimaginative, sticks, the effect of which was the same.

It wasn’t that Sanders didn’t like children. He adored children, at least in the abstract. Read on