Wharton Williams wanted love. Instead, he got money.  It came over the telephone.

"Mr. Wharton?"

"Williams."

"Williams Wharton?"

"Wharton Williams."

"I see. Our records show you as the holder of LottoWorld ticket 9078847."

"I paid for it," Wharton said, recalling how he had handed his dollar to the simple-faced blond kid at the store, both of them having a hard time keeping their eyes off the pert clerk at the next register.

A chuckle came from the other end of the line. The man’s voice had an old-fashioned kind of suave rhythm, like a hotel orchestra.

"We’re sure you paid, Mr. Wharton."

"Williams. Wharton Williams."

Wharton told himself to be civil, feeling his shirt cling to his back. He lived in the kind of little Kansas town where the heat is always sticky and the cold is always bitter.

"I see." The voice syncopated through two beats of silence. "You won."

Another beat.

"Right," Wharton answered, thinking: they’re selling something.

Another beat. Another chuckle. "We’re used to skepticism, Mr. Wharton. I’m on my way to your residence as we speak. If I’m not at your front door in fifteen minutes, I’m a figment of your imagination."

The line went silent.

"Wharton, Wharton, who’s on the phone?"

"No one, Mother."

---

"I wanted love, but I got money," Wharton told Dr. Osmose, the ever sphinxlike Dr. Osmose. Wharton counted his way along the Greek frieze of wallpaper at the edge of the ceiling and wondered if this was what he was supposed to realize, the point of nine thousand dollars' worth of therapy. It was a point he had made to himself repeatedly for three years, beginning at the moment the black limousine had parked in his mother’s driveway. A man who looked exactly as he sounded had walked to the door at the head of an entourage of PR flacks and, amid the clicking of shutters, handed Wharton a check for thirty million dollars.

Maybe it wasn’t the point. On the forty-seventh curlicue of the frieze, Wharton tried again.

"I wanted love from Becky Adams."

"Yes. Becky Adams."

From Dr. Osmose this was a lot, guidance, practically. Wharton felt better about the course of the therapy.

He said, "Becky was not a person who could give love easily."

"I see."

---

Back in his white Infiniti convertible, on the way to an hour of being patronized by the golf pro at West Hills Country Club, Wharton thought about Becky Adams and love. He decided he could probably quit seeing Dr. Osmose. It wasn’t doing him any good.

"You’re breaking your wrists," the pro said without any hint of impatience, keeping five feet away from Wharton’s back swing on the lush grass of the practice tee. West Hills was overdone, the most expensive club in the area that didn’t require antecedents. Wharton swung, and sliced the ball thirty yards off the driving range.

Wharton’s mother had moved into the best retirement complex in the Eastgate section of Wichita, six hours away by road and air. For a woman who had accepted his presence for thirty-three years, she got on well without him.

"Becky Adams is teaching at Hamilton Elementary School," she told Wharton when he came to visit. He flew to Kansas twice a year.

"Really?"

"Do you miss your job?"

"Sometimes. I’m going to Australia next month, to watch the America’s Cup."

"What do they do with it?"

"The America’s Cup is a sailboat race."

"Is it hard to watch?"

Flying back after this visit, across the first class aisle, he first saw Abigail Andersen. She had the look of antecedents, one of those women who fly as if thirty thousand feet is their natural altitude, put together, absorbed in a serious novel. Wharton had been thinking of how he didn’t miss his job at all. When he saw Abigail reading, he couldn’t resist.

"I heard this may be her crossover book," he tried, pointing his finger into the space between the author’s name on the dust jacket and the hosiery on Abigail’s knee. "When I taught English, I always assigned her short stories."

Abigail closed the book and smiled. "I used to teach English," she said, "also."

Wharton didn’t go to Australia. Instead, he took Abigail to dinner.  He learned she had married away from teaching English and then married away from corporate ladder-climbing. At the end of her second marriage, she had received, along with some money, membership in a country club that required antecedents. She took Wharton there often. The service was slower than West Hills, and the menu was more reasonable.

She never talked about her husbands. A past, Wharton thought, colored with experience.

"Widowed? I thought you were divorced," he said one morning after she had quietly mentioned certain legal complications with respect to her second husband’s estate.

"I never said divorced," she answered, perfect red nails slipping away from the coffee cup she placed in front of Wharton. He had slept over for the first time.

"Warren died?"

"Warren and William both died."

"While you were married to them?"

"You make it sound like a sequence."

Over fresh flowers and good china and eggs she had poached herself she watched him levelly, with some right to be demanding. In bed, she had been compliant and adroit.

"Of course not," he said with less deference than he might have shown Becky Adams in the days before his money came. Wealth had brought him close to a number of women, though no others of Abigail’s quality.

"Anyway," she said, scraping fork tines through her egg, "there are delays. Legal things. And my rent. The maid."

On his way to West Hills, still tasting Abigail’s composed parting kiss and seeing the check he had left on her silk-robed lap, Wharton pondered the alphabetical conundrums of his life. His first and last names began with W, the same as the first names of both of Abigail’s husbands. And he was failing to fall in love for the second time, with a woman whose names both started with A, as in Becky Adams.

At the height of Wharton’s back swing, the golf pro said, "I knew Warren Andersen."The club ripped into the black loam beneath the turf, two-hundred-dollar graphite shaft bending like a bow.

"Dropped your shoulder, lifted your head, twisted your knees," the pro instructed.

"Was he a member here?" Wharton asked, as he stooped to right the ball on the tee.

"North Meadows. Old money. Played the pro-ams. Hell of a golfer."

Wharton wanted to ask how Warren Andersen died, but this bore the tinge of something he should already know.

"Fell out a window," the pro said, shaking his head as he reached around to adjust Wharton’s grip. His arms kept a manly quarter inch of distance. Breath hot and sweet touched Wharton’s cheek. "Scuttlebutt has it, the insurance company is kicking."

"Why?"

"Suicide. Murder. You’re holding the club too tight. Loosen up."

"Is she a nice girl?" Wharton’s mother asked on his next visit.

Hearing in the question a comparison to Becky Adams, he answered, "Abigail is very respectable. She comes from good family."

His mother placed in front of him a plate of macaroni and cheese of the kind they used to eat once a week. His flight would leave in two hours.

"What does she do?"

"Nothing. She’s wealthy."

"As rich as you?"

"Almost nobody is as rich as me."

Or at least, he corrected himself on the plane, Abigail would be wealthy when the insurance company finally settled. A million and a half rock bottom, the lawyers kept assuring her. Lawyers he paid. He gave her three thousand dollars a week for the house and the maid and living. Their sexual adroitness had progressed to a high plateau.

"Wharton?" the caller asked uncertainly. "Becky Adams. I’m in town. On a bus tour."

Becky had gained weight, Wharton saw when he picked her up at the terminal. He hadn’t been with a woman who wore inexpensive clothes in a long time. In the seat of the Infiniti, curls blowing, she looked like Kansas. They had lunch at a place he had never tried before, then he took her back to the tour group.

That night after Abigail had gone to sleep, slender back rising and falling under his arm, he thought about his teaching days. Becky used to submit to sex with a prissy determination, the way she might clean a fish. Once in the crawl space beneath the school stage, her back sticking to the clammy vinyl of a tumbling mat, she had whispered, "Do you love me?"

"Yes," he had answered.

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