"How'd that go?"
"I got some on my shoe."
"Everybody gets some on their shoe the first time." There was a pause. She could hear the garage around him, the hum of the big fluorescent lights, the radio. "What tape?"
"Ah," said Vivienne. "I'm not sure I'm at liberty to say."
She called again the next night, and the night after that, and by the third time she had stopped telling herself why. At nine o'clock she would go down to the wood-paneled booth in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth with a roll of quarters from the front desk, and the phone in Coldwater would be picked up on the first ring, because, it emerged, Georgie had appointed herself to sit beside it from eight-fifty onward.
Georgie ran the calls like a talk show. She would report the day's news from the garage: who had been towed, who had been grumpy, and the progress of a raccoon who had so far defeated a bungee cord, a cinder block, and Doris. Then Georgie would say, "What's French for 'wind shear'?" and Vivienne would say, "Cisaillement du vent," and Georgie would try to say it and fail and laugh until she got the hiccups, and then she would say, "Okay, here's Dad, you have nine minutes, I'm timing," and hand the receiver over with a sound like someone passing a baton.
And then for nine minutes, or eleven, or once, scandalously, twenty-six, Vivienne talked to Luc Beaulieu.
They did not talk about anything important. That was what she noticed afterward. He told her about the transmission he was rebuilding for a dairy farmer in Granville. She told him about the Soviet delegate who said "with respect" before every sentence and meant it less each time. He told her the Red Sox were a lesson in the meaning of suffering. He asked whether she was sleeping, and whether the Alfa was starting cold in the mornings. She asked him why he had stayed in Coldwater, and he was quiet for a while and then said, "I don't know that I ever stayed anywhere. I just never left. There's a difference, maybe. I haven't figured out which one I am."
She did not tell him about Geneva. She thought about it every night with her hand on the folding glass door of the booth, and every night she did not.
On the eighth day, which was Monday the nineteenth of October, the stock market in New York fell off a cliff.
It came through her headphones in the middle of a session on de-icing fluids, as a rustle through the hall, aides coming in with slips of paper, the American delegation leaving one by one with faces like men who have smelled smoke. By evening the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth was full of businessmen around the television over the bar, and someone was saying "twenty-two percent" over and over, as if the number would go back up if he shouted it.
That night when she came down to the booths, the desk clerk handed her a message slip. Mr. Oscar Thornton had called, four times. Please call back. Urgent.
She went into the booth and dialed New York, because whatever else he was, she had been married to him for eleven years.