25.

It’s been a peculiar afternoon. A tall glass of vodka and OJ will settle the nerves, I hope, before Eka comes down. In her honor, I’m drinking Georgi.

I’ll tell you the story. You may think it’s funny.

I spent the morning regretting the e-mail I sent Lena, to put it mildly. In fear and dread, I kept a safe distance from my computer, lest I rashly check for a response.

Around noon, while vacuuming the clots of hair and dust from the corners of the living room for my visitor’s sake, I heard ringing. A hallucination, I assumed—but no, the call was real.

It’s her.

If anyone could have seen the size of my terror, I would have been humiliated.

The caller wasn’t Lena, but the voice was just as soft. Dr. Gerard Jones invited me to his home in Summit for lunch.

Stopped Heart: the Sequel. He Knows It’s Me.

“Any particular reason?” I asked.

“Let’s wait and talk face to face.”

He’s a small man—on a seesaw, two of him in wet clothes wouldn’t lift me off the ground—yet there I stood, immobilized. The elephant challenged by the mouse.

I could have dodged the invitation, but this close to the end, I’d rather not sully my self-image with acts of cowardice.

Truax’s Paradox: You can never get where you want to go. Resolve to smother yourself, and the Girl in Red returns to torment you. Send her a pathetic message, and a dying immigrant faints on your floor. Agree to write the immigrant’s biography, and your despised benefactor invites you to lunch. One could say, I can’t wait to see where this will end, but I just find it irritating.

The winding streets of Summit are full of imposing brick homes, many of them mottled with faux-antique whitewash. The biggest manse, the king of the hill, flew the rippling Stars and Stripes; I assumed I’d arrived, but no, my host lives down the slope, in a modest ranch house with a wood shingle roof. His lawn and shrubs are neatly barbered but without the deep mulch and undulating acreage of the larger homes. Doubtful that the eminent Dr. Jones could live in this Leave It To Beaver house, I double-checked the address. Yup. He can and he does.

On his doorpost, he has one of those slanted ceramic tubules with a Hebrew inscription. How’s that for unexpected?

A possibly Vietnamese girl in a pink tracksuit led me to a den furnished with pieces from other worlds: a dark armoire with bas-relief dragons carved into the doors, a striped kilim on the floor, a Hindu-ish mantelpiece with mother-of-pearl inlay. I heard my host in the next room, consulting with a colleague by phone. Vision loss, angiogram, aneurysm, scar tissue, clips—these were the only terms I understood.

The room smelled like my Aunt Gerda’s house, long ago: classic Jersey mildew. A photo showed a less bald Dr. Jones with his teenage children on a long-ago safari. A framed letter from the king of Thailand thanked him for saving the prince’s life, on royal letterhead.

Dr. Jones appeared in clean jeans, moccasins, and a zippered cardigan. Our handshake was comical. The tiny fellow!

The maid, Sue—or maybe Thu—served us oranges, scones, and triangles of BLT on white toast. The doctor drank Sam Adams; I opted for cranberry juice and seltzer, having already dosed myself with mezcal in preparation for this meeting.

A new odor had entered the room with him. I remembered it from our long-ago interview. The smell suggested cleanliness, with a tinge of hospital. Disinfectant? Could be.

Breezily postponing whatever lay in store for me, I asked, “Why the Judaica at the front door, Dr. Jones?”

He said his father was born Jacoby and changed his name as a young man, “for business reasons.”

His manner was subdued, calmly cordial, distracted, elusive. It seemed possible that he planned to blow me out of the water with a direct question, Why do you write these ugly libels about me?—or else that he only wanted to talk me into speaking at his gala.

Rather than confronting me, he asked if I’d seen today’s paper. “Despite my profession,” I admitted, “I haven’t read a newspaper in years.” His point: an earthquake in Guangdong province had destroyed most of a small city where he once taught a seminar on dural repair techniques. “The mayor was so proud of the new construction in his city. Now it no longer exists. I wonder if he survived.”

“Senseless deaths, distant multitudes. The eternal head-line.”

“You’re right. The farther away the suffering is, the less real it feels.” He ate an orange segment with small, unassuming jaw movements. “You have a skill I admire,” he added, an apparent non sequitur.

“You know about my years as a jockey?”

With an aloof quarter-smile, he let the quip pass.

“You show your readers the humanity in your subjects. And you do it with such a light touch. The tragedy shows through, but it’s never a heavy syrup. I don’t know how you pull it off.”

His use of the present tense bothered me. “I assume you know I’ve retired.”

He sought my eyes, but I wasn’t lending them out.

In general, I’ll say anything to anyone, as you know, Brother Bob. With this petite physician, however, I found myself silenced. Muzzled.

“I wanted to discuss that with you,” he said. “Was there a specific dissatisfaction we could address?”

“Yes. I hated everything about the job.”

Have I mentioned that Dr. Jones is the one who got me this job? I profiled him once, when I used to write features about Jersey bigwigs; after I fell into disgrace, he resuscitated my career by recommending me for the Neighbors in Need column. In other words, I had just spat in his face.

Rather than take offense, he studied me with seeming sympathy. “Usually, what we do well gives us pleasure and pride. Why didn’t you enjoy the work?”

I began to writhe internally. I had no desire to undergo therapy with this minuscule overachiever. There seemed something wrong with his paying this much attention to me. Aha, I thought. This is his revenge.

I said, “It offends me to lie every day.”

“How were you lying?”

“By portraying these people as colorful Dickensian unfortunates. They’re not nearly that lovable.”

He has a nervous tic, an involuntary blink. Knowing his résumé, one expects arrogance, but he gives the impression of perfect humility. If you saw him in a restaurant, you might guess he taught bookkeeping at a community college.

A phone call interrupted us. He took it in the next room—something about the dedication of a hospital in Botswana. They wanted him to cut the ribbon but he preferred to leave the spotlight to other donors. Apparently, however, Dr. Nkate was counting on him to be there, which swayed him.

On his return, he peeled a second orange. A rime of white pith coated his fingers. “I’m sorry you’ve spent so long doing something you considered dishonest. I can see why you’d want to escape. Have you thought about a career you’d prefer?”

It was a fair question. If I’m so unhappy as Mr. Misery, why not just change jobs? Must one really kill oneself?

“I have no idea,” I said, quite sincerely.

From the little secretary behind him, he took a silver and gold fountain pen, and began to scribble on a pad of graph paper. He wasn’t solving my problem; he was drawing rhombi and trapezoids, each contained within its own blue square, each made of wet black ink that dried almost instantly. My irresponsibility had so dismayed him that all he could do was doodle.

The danger of a confrontation appeared to have blown over. There seemed no point in my being there, but no way to escape. Contrasting thoughts wafted through my mind:

•He must have a shameful secret. Boy prostitutes? Shaved pubes?

•Despite his achievements, our sizes put us on a near-equal footing—a vestige of caveman times.

“Why,” I asked, because the silence had grown difficult, “are you so unassuming?”

While weighing the question, he drew three circles of increasing size that shared a bottom point. “The people who come to me expect me to reverse the effects of degenerative diseases or head trauma. Sometimes I can help them, sometimes I can’t. There isn’t much chance I’ll mistake myself for God.”

I had the sense that, for whatever misguided reasons, he saw me as someone with whom he could speak openly.

Sue or Thu announced another call. I twiddled my thumbs—literally, to see why others have resorted to this inane pastime (no insights to report)—and found myself so exasperated by his sympathy that, eventually, I got up and slipped out the front door.

And now I’m back in my dungeon, waiting for Eka’s visit and feeling a bit of remorse over my recent online aggression against the good doctor—while wondering if he arranged our meeting for exactly that purpose.

The contrast between his home and mine doesn’t cheer me. After cleaning for an hour, the place still looks shabby and disreputable, though less foul. If I had a can of paint, I’d cover the water stains on the wall. Too late now, though.

I’m afraid, Brother Bob. I’ve been afraid all day. It’s time to check my e-mail, but I can’t make myself. Nothing good can be waiting for me.

Imagine the impossible. From: Lena Sjöman. You were right, long ago. There was a special connection. But that frightened me. We have lost these many years but maybe it’s not too late?

What if she actually wants to see me? What then?

Calm yourself, man. There’s no chance.

Drum roll . . .

All that agitation for nothing. No new messages, except a coupon for Payless.

Holy Shevardnadze, Batman. There’s so much to tell. Where to begin?

I’ll have to transcribe the tape—but not yet.

She arrived shyly, wouldn’t accept sherbet or a Swiss roll, only water. She had dressed up for our interview, in a nicer outfit than I’ve seen her wear before, a black dress with red flowers, which looked out of place on my couch with the water stain behind her. The hand tremor seemed worse, though that may be because I watched for it.

Knees together, straight-backed, girlish, she watched the little geared hubs turn behind the window of the cassette recorder.

As a warm-up, I asked what living in the United States is like for her. She said, “I love this country. So much everything, all kind of food—Mexican, Chinese, hamburgers. I love hamburgers. But living here, I think so much, What do I do here? I want to see my family. We do Skype, but this is not satisfying me. My brother’s babies grow, grow, two nieces. I don’t meet them yet, never. And my mother grows old. What kind daughter I am, so far away?”

The tears were flowing already, and we hadn’t even begun. Tissueless, I brought her a roll of paper towels and changed direction. “Tell me about your earliest memories.”

In nursery school, which she called baby children school, “everyone must to take nap but I don’t want nap, I look in dark at the dolls, which are for display only. But when commissar comes to inspect, they hurry, hurry, bring toys to show us happy playing.” She owned a Vankastanka, a wobbly toy with a round bottom—her father managed a factory that made them. This versatile factory also printed books and magazines, and manufactured ladies’ shoes. The managers would go traveling in Russia, selling their products.

She had a baby brother who died. “Too soon he is born, at six month. They give milk in hospital, but he got sick from hole in intestine.”

Her accent goes beyond the standard Eastern European caricature. She pronounces work “vork.” (Rhymes with fork.) Regular becomes “regoolar.” Then there’s the foorniture, and the things she like-èd, and the tasks that come easy-ly to her. Every syllable brings a new surprise.

Under the Soviets, she said, life was secure, if limited. The government provided for people. “The house is warm, we have clothes.” But ten people shared their two-bedroom apartment, and they couldn’t afford to go on a vacation, and when her father bought her a bicycle, he had to report how he got the money and they kept watch over him for months afterward. “My father never finds job again after Georgia independence, but still he like the new government better. ‘Better to be free and hungry.’ He says this.”

I found her stories moderately interesting, but unusable. Granted, we’d only been together for ten minutes, but I had a bad feeling that we wouldn’t arrive at the heart of the matter anytime soon. And neither of us has unlimited time.

I asked her to tell me about the river.

“Everyone knows, polluted. But my father say, ‘Always I fish on this river.’ So—he goes every day. Too many people fish there, not him only. They stand on road by the side. They swim also. Water is brown like chocolate, but they swim. So he brings home fish, silver fish, long like hand. My mother cleans carefully. We think this is safe because she cleans.”

Her father died just before she emigrated. The many stories she told about him show a poignant devotion to his memory. She seems not to have realized that she wouldn’t be dying if not for his stubbornness.

“Have other people who lived near the river been getting sick?”

“I don’t know this. I will ask mother.”

She studied to become a nurse at the university. Her husband went to Tbilisi after their son was born, to work as a meteorologist, and met someone else there. He never came back.

“I work in hospital, in cardiology. Too many people have heart attacks. Day and night we make EKG, we make reanimation. It was too hard job, long, long nights, but I keep working to support mother, son, and grandparents.”

She stopped, eyes brimming. You must assume I have experience with crying people, but it’s not so: my profilees generally hold it together in interviews. The point is, I don’t know what to do with weeping women.

“Let’s go back to childhood,” I said. “Tell me more of your early memories.”

Her mouth went small and pouty. I think she took offense at my impatience.

“We had on the wall nice Oriental rug. Too good for floor. And always, my father got big Christmas tree. One year, my baby sister, Maka, got doll. And she cut out mother’s best dress to sew for her doll, a little dress like mother’s. My mother screamed when she saw, ‘What do you did?’”

Eka laughed, not at that memory, but the next one. “How we played! She was geese, I was wolf, other sister was other wolf. We called, ‘Geese, geese, where you are?’ In Georgian, this is rhyme. And she runs, and we catch, but she screams, afraid really of the wolfs.”

What else? She skipped ahead twenty years or so. Her son was ten when she left; she talks to him two or three times a week, the calls are affordable with a special phone card (five dollars buys two and a half hours), but she longs to hold him the way she did when he was a baby. That will be difficult, since he’s sixteen now and plays basketball in a youth league. He’s very good, she says. He dreams of playing in the NBA, like Zaza Pachulia. But she missed his childhood: more tears.

If I’d let her go on, she would have told me a dozen more unrelated tales. I don’t know how I’m going to manage this, Bob. I’m drowning in unusable tidbits. I could bang out a column on her in twenty minutes. But a book?

There was a moment when I thought I saw her peering at my gut, as if noticing my size for the first time. For all my experience with stares, I became self-conscious. My forearms, I saw, were thicker than her calves. Ordinarily, my size seems more or less normal to me, but for one hallucinatory moment, I saw myself as thin people must: inflated, grotesque. This did not endear her to me.

At my door, as I huffed and puffed and said good night, she asked hopefully, “You think book will earn much money?”

Her frankness chilled me. Even if she’s dying, I don’t like the idea of serving as a causeway to her pot of gold. Still, I swallowed my dismay and left her dreams intact. “I hope so. Yes.”

She urged me to be tough with her. “If I don’t answer good, you must say.”

“I will.”

As she turned to go, her cheek twitched. “You help me so much.”

“It’s what I do.”

She was careful, however, not to say, How can I ever thank you?

So much glop. How to organize it all?

Begin with the river. Its path, its history, its defilement. The specific toxins poured into it, the names of the factories along its banks.

Next, Eka’s earliest memories of the river. Swimming, if possible.

Eka in the river, the river in Eka.

Begin this way. The rest will come.