She wrote-nonfiction, she had a degree in it-but she picked up magazine assignments infrequently and had trouble finishing pieces.

Sometimes she called herself a journalist, but that wasnвЂ™t quite right. Apparently, she didnвЂ™t like their new life in the country, either. She hadnвЂ™t left him because of the job (at a large financial firm), though she didnвЂ™t like his new job or believe that he liked it. But then, shortly after buying the house and leaving the city, he had, in quick succession, lost his new job and lost Sophie.

вЂњSophieвЂ™s choice,вЂќ he jokingly told people. JackвЂ™s house was in the next county over, half an hour away by car, but he was a newcomer and he didnвЂ™t know anyone else yet. Then he forgot it, and he probably would have forgotten Valente, too, if years later he hadnвЂ™t moved to the rural area where, according to their mutual friend Daniel, Valente lived at home with his mother. When this insight lit up within him, it seemed to glow for a minute with a profound and inarticulable meaning. He had been lying completely stoned in a friendвЂ™s common room, gazing up at the crown moldings, when he realized that people called Valente вЂњthe WhaleвЂќ not simply because of the association pattern in certain words but in reference to the story of Jonah. In the indolent, halcyon days before graduation, Jack had thought about Valente exactly once. You knew very little about your classmates in the end, their real lives and disappointments and hopes, and what you did know was mostly hearsay, and often dubious and even somewhat fantastical.

According to rumors at the time, his expulsion had to do with drugs, but Valente maintained among his friends that it was the schoolвЂ™s way of punishing him for quitting football. A year later, after spending the summer in Florence on a painting scholarship, Valente got kicked out of school. This got shortened to B.A., and then Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, simply the Whale, and, by a different route altogether, Picasso. When Valente left the football team, changed his major, and began hanging out with a group of druggy slackers who loitered around the Visual Arts department like sun-drunk flies, the school paper ran a feature on his unusual transformation and he acquired the nickname Beaux Arts. ValenteвЂ™s claim to fame, what had made him a figure on campus-one of that subset of maybe fifty classmates who, possessing some extravagance of character, defined the larger composite character by which the student body understood itself-came from his having abruptly quit football during sophomore year to take up painting, a passion he had developed apparently out of the blue and with a single-minded earnestness that embarrassed his more sophisticated classmates, who knew to disguise their sincerity. An awkward, intense, muscle-bound young man, the sort you could imagine crashing through a wall accidentally, he had had the dim, muddled quality of students recruited to play football at the school, who either didnвЂ™t measure up academically or didnвЂ™t believe they did. Jonah Valente had been an object of amusement to Jack and his college classmates, and presumably he had gone on being one to other people ever since.

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