way that he hadn’t seemed to notice the hostess’s breasts at Alberini’s the night before. Maybe he just hadn’t been in America long enough to read the code, to understand what a Mercedes meant that a Chevrolet did not, to know what kinds of people went through the door of a Smith Barney office and what kinds of people did not, to judge a person by the size of her wedding ring or the cost of her purse, or her license-plate frame or bumper sticker, or the newspaper she chose to read. Once you’d become aware of such things, whether they sent positive or negative signals running through you, how
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