THE JOKE WAS THAT THEY’D FOUND AN ANGEL to play another angel, though he told them that his name was just plain Rafe, not Raphael.

“And those guys are both archangels anyway,” the director said. Edmund. “Gabriel, Raphael. They’re both archangels.” They were sitting onstage, most of them at a big table, some in scattered chairs around the periphery.

“Pardon my French, but what the fuck are archangels?” This was somebody whose job he wasn’t sure of. A sound guy, maybe. Or electrics.

“The head honcho types in heaven, I think,” Edmund said.

“Just one plain old angel would be good enough for me, thank you very much.” That was the stage manager, Ellie. She had her computer set up on the table and was typing into it, even while she was talking, notes on what needed to get done.

Edmund had laughed. “An angel. One would do. Yes indeedy. But where, oh where is he?”

Rafe sat and listened to the horsing around, feeling mostly relief. He’d gotten the part. He needed the part. He needed to stay busy, to stay away from the house. He needed to be in this world, where everything else fell away. Where only this was real—what happened on the stage and how you made it happen—and reality was irrelevant.

It was Edmund who had asked him to read. They’d worked together years earlier, but Edmund had seen him recently in Uncle Vanya and liked the rueful quality he projected. This is what he’d said on the phone.

“Yeah, well, I’m your go-to guy for rue,” Rafe had said.

Edmund was short, fat, balding, seemingly mild. Everyone knew better. He was in control always. He shaped everything by asking his gentle, persistent questions. He had a full beard, and his hands’ almost-relentless attention to it was part of how he talked. He stroked it, pulled at it, twirled its ends. He had done all of these things while Rafe was reading, and Rafe had found it hard to ignore.

Among the other slacker-looking people who had been sitting around or drifting in and out while Rafe was reading—costume people and sound people and set designers and builders, gofers of one kind or another—was a person so small he took her at first for a child, and almost made a remark. It would have been one of his usual pointlessly sarcastic things: “Is someone here babysitting?”

But he didn’t, unaccountably. And luckily, he supposed, as she was, of course, the playwright, though he didn’t find that out until a week or so later.

So, rue. Well, the passage he’d read was from the first act, a section in which his character, Gabriel, is explaining to his daughter-in-law, Emily, drink in hand, the state of his marriage, the complicated reasons for his calmness in the face of the terrible news his son has just brought him. Or the potentially terrible news.

What he says is that he and his wife have withdrawn from each other over the years. He says that neither is really fully alive or real to the other. “Maybe you know how it is when you’re tired and don’t feel like having sex,” he says to Emily. “You know, you undress carefully, you expose only a little flesh at a time, so as never to be fully naked, never to seem to be issuing some kind of invitation with your body, God forbid. Maybe”—and Rafe had smiled here—“you don’t know how that is. Lucky you. But even so, maybe you can imagine this: that there’s a later stage you can reach when you don’t bother with even that formality because there’s no possibility either one of you could ever feel invited by the other’s nakedness.” He had paused. “Well, there’s a parallel thing that happens emotionally after you’ve lived too carefully around each other too long, always hiding some part of yourself. You stop caring.” He’d dropped the smile here, let his whole face fall. “In just the way your bodies are dead to each other, so is everything else. There’s nothing you can say that will charm the other or, for that matter, hurt the other, because nothing you say is ever of any importance at all. Your conversations remain polite, fully clothed, as it were, at all times. And in the end, with us, they were so pointless that we literally stopped speaking.”

He had shrugged. “I remember having friends drop in on us in the summerhouse in Massachusetts. I remember that we were laughing and talking up to the minute they left. Elizabeth had told a story about a student of hers who would come to office hours and start to cry the moment she crossed the threshold into her office. It was a victory, she said, when by midsemester the girl got halfway through a conference before the waterworks started.

“I remember watching her talking about this and thinking how lively she was, how attractive. She has a way of telling stories—well, you know it—a way of saying, ‘ “Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum,”… says she, “Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum,” … says I.’ That nice inversion that makes it seem that you’re listening to an old familiar tale. A nursery rhyme. Or even a song. I remember thinking … I guess just thinking her name: Elizabeth. Startled by her, you know, as though she’d just come back from a long trip away. Or maybe as if I’d just come back from a long trip away.

“Anyway, we stood by the car saying good-bye, and then we stood in the driveway waving.” He’d been smiling a big false smile as he said this, and waving, a monarch’s regal slight turning of the hand this way and that. “And the moment the car turned into the road”—he dropped the smile, made his voice hard, brisk—“she turned one way and went inside, and I turned the other way and went in the other direction.” He gave a short, mirthless laugh: “Back to our corners.” He held his hand up, palm forward. “‘Show’s over, folks.’”

They’d liked this. They’d asked him to read a few other shorter speeches. He was hired, amid the jokes about his name.

In the car on the way home, he let himself start to worry about Lauren. He’d been around most evenings for a while—ever since Vanya closed, actually. He thought she might miss that—his getting dinner for her, helping her with it, getting her to bed.

But if she had a moment’s pang, he didn’t see it. What she said was that it might actually be easier for the Round Robin to make time for her in the evening than it was for them in the day.

The Round Robin was what they called the group of friends who had, for the moment, taken on Lauren’s care. Later they would need to pay for someone, later they would need professionals, but for now one of Lauren’s friends, Carol, had summoned these others, friends of Lauren’s or friends of Carol’s who knew about Lauren, and they made her life—and his, too, he recognized—possible.

They didn’t all come into the house. One shopped for them, one took Lauren to the hospital and to doctors’ appointments. But most of them helped her—helped them—in more intimate ways: cooking for them, feeding Lauren, taking her to the bathroom, getting her to bed at night when he was working.

She had welcomed this, because her main wish was that he be freed of all these tasks so that he could see her as a woman still, not an invalid. This is what she’d said to him, weeping, one night early on after the diagnosis was made, when they were still trying to ignore the symptoms—the broken dishes, the orange juice that slopped onto the table as she poured it. The trembling, the falls, the bruises. She said that she didn’t want to become an illness to him. That she wanted, most of all, to stay real to him as a person, as a woman, as his wife.

“As my sexy wife,” he’d said. He’d brushed her hair back off her face, thumbed away the tear sliding down her cheek.

Later she didn’t weep anymore. Later she joked about it. “Don’t you think it’s weird, this newfangled business of naming everything? Megan’s Law. Amber Alert. Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

“But there’s Halley’s comet,” he pointed out. “Maybe it was ever thus.”

“Still. A disease,” she said. “If it’s his disease, why do I have to have it. ‘Lou! Lou! Come back! You forgot your disease!’”

By then they weren’t making love anymore.

They’d met in college, when Rafe was, as he put it later, “basically priapic.” It’s what had drawn him into acting as an undergraduate, he’d told her all those years later. He assumed the women would all be beautiful and sexually liberated.

He was wrong in this assumption. Some were beautiful, some were not. Some were liberated, some were not. But most of them had no desire to sleep with him, a lowly sophomore. They were interested in the older actors, in the directors, in their teachers.

Lauren was his lab partner in biology, and she was interested in sleeping with him. Very interested. For a few weeks in their sophomore year they had frantic sex together through long late afternoons in his dorm room, the noise of his roommates’ lives on the other side of the door the background to their marathons. She was then still a little chunky, she wore glasses that she ceremonially removed before their exertions began.

They tried everything they could think of. She was the first person who ever gave him a blow job, who ever licked his balls, put her finger up his ass, let him do the same to her. She showed him how to flatten and widen his tongue to give her more pleasure, she corrected the way his mouth pulled at her nipples. Finally he had found her almost mannish, as he thought of it, in her willingness to experiment, her seemingly coldhearted enthusiasm to try the next forbidden thing. He tired of her. He tired of it. It was as though she were working from a text, he told her later when he met her again, when he fell in love with her.

Oh, she had been, she assured him. It was the way she’d done everything then. By the book.

Their second meeting happened twelve years after their first, when their real lives had begun. Though sometimes he thought now that perhaps they hadn’t yet begun, even at that point. Perhaps the present was the real part, the true test, and all the rest of it mere preparation.

Either way, they were both happy in their work then, single, in their early thirties, still living in Berkeley, which is where they’d met the first time around, where they’d gone to college. She came to a benefit for the repertory company he was with, after a performance of their ongoing play, Bosoms and Neglect. Rafe was Scooper, and he was still in costume and makeup, as were the other two players, so that they could easily be recognized by patrons who might want to schmooze with them, whose asses they had been instructed to kiss as enthusiastically as possible.

At first he’d taken her for one of these patrons. She looked expensive. She was tall and slender. Her brown hair had been streaked silvery blond. She wore dangly silver earrings and a big silver cuff on one wrist. Her heels were very high, her legs miles long and nicely shaped. She had on a black sleeveless dress, and her bare shoulders were like sheeny knobs jutting out of it. He wouldn’t mind kissing her ass, he thought.

He proceeded to start to do so, repeating the things they’d been told to say to the patrons, the questions they’d been instructed to ask: how lovely of her to come, the theater so appreciated her support, had she been to other performances?

She stood smiling at him for a long moment, and then she said, “You don’t have the foggiest who I am, do you?”

Uh-oh, he thought. Someone really important. “I’m sorry, I don’t.” He gestured, shook his head. “I’m kind of the village idiot at these affairs. Please help me out here.”

“Lauren Willetts.” She tilted her head slightly. Her hair swung over and kissed her shoulder. Her eyes were steady on him.

He was looking right at her and he didn’t remember.

“Lauren Willetts,” she said slowly.

Nothing.

She opened her purse, fished in it, took out some thick glasses, and put them on. “Lauren,” she said again.

“That Lauren?” he said. My God. Ugly duckling to swan of swans.

She took the glasses off. “Have there been so many other Laurens?” She was smiling.

He looked her up and down. He could feel himself starting to get hard, remembering. He laughed. “None quite like that one.”

“Though you ran away from her, as I recollect it.” She raised her finger, scolding.

“Well, she was scary.”

“Was that it?”

“And a little … heartless, I guess.”

“But you were, too, of course.”

“Yes. Well. I guess I expected that I had the patent on heartlessness then.”

“I was infringing, as it were.”

As quickly as that, he was tired of banter. “Listen, are you here with someone?”

She laughed again. “A friend.”

“So I couldn’t take you home.”

She shook her head. “You could call me, though.”

And again she fished in her bag. She brought out a little embroidered envelope and extracted a business card from it.

LAUREN MARGOLIN, it said. TECHNICAL CONSULTING.

He looked up at her. “Margolin.”

“Yes.”

“You’re married.”

She shook her head. “Not anymore, I’m not.” She walked away. He watched the rolling motion of her buttocks, the alternating wink of her long muscled calves below the black dress.

Someone touched his elbow and he turned, smiling. But distracted. And he was distracted until he saw her again, and then he was distracted until they had sex again, which happened almost immediately. And then he fell in love with her.

In the early days of this second time around, they talked a lot about their other, younger selves, and how the strangeness of their affair then had made this one inevitable. How, the minute each of them had realized who the other was, they wanted to redo what they’d done, but differently. Once more, with feeling. “Or maybe a couple of times more,” she said.

Many, many times more, it turned out.

It was both like and then unlike the way he remembered it. She was as strong and as wild as ever. Rafe had never had such an athletic, experimental lover. But this time it seemed they were driven by something deeper within both of them, something that perhaps had to do with the wish to revise old vulnerabilities. To make up for what seemed wrong-hearted or emotionally truncated in the first experience.

But there was something about the first experience that compelled them, too—its very limitations, its sad desperation. Rafe sometimes felt swept by a tender sorrow after they’d made love, sorrow for something they might have had then, when they were so hungry and needy, but hadn’t. Something that gave even their most ordinary couplings now a sense of depth, an inexplicable element, a pentimento.

After they’d been living together for about a year, she got a job doing tech stuff for an NGO based in Boston, so they moved to Cambridge. Rafe had to more or less begin his career again, but his connections in Berkeley had connections in Boston, and eventually he landed in the repertory company he preferred in town. They lived marginally, though every now and then Lauren got an independent consulting job that made them suddenly very flush. Then they’d take a vacation in the Caribbean, or rent a house in Vermont for the summer, or stay in a good hotel in New York for a week and see plays and hear great music. Once she bought him a Joseph Abboud suit. Once she bought herself a Jennifer Bartlett print.

They got married. Time passed. They moved a few times as apartments in Cambridge got more expensive, inching their way east and south, closer to MIT, to the river. Their old ardor became intermittent. She accused him of being withdrawn. They fought occasionally about his acting, the way in which he lost himself in it. She said that sometimes she hated seeing him in a play. “It makes me mad, how alive you are onstage when you have so little energy for me.” She had an affair that she told him about.

He had one.

They resolved not to tell each other about their affairs, which, after all, had nothing to do with their marriage, with who they were together.

But he couldn’t stand living with her and not knowing who she might be thinking of in those moments when her face went blank—what she might be imagining then. He left.

He moved to New York, to see if he had what it took. That was the way he put it, to her and to others. Later he was sorry for this, because he had to acknowledge that when the question was framed that way, the answer had to be no.

He got some walk-ons, occasionally a small speaking role, but he was a little too old for most leads, too good-looking in a sort of has-been way for most character parts, too unknown, too unconnected. And maybe, just maybe, he didn’t have what it took.

Then there was his life, the way he had to live in New York—though for the first eight months or so, it was fine. He was essentially house-sitting then, paying a token amount each month to stay in the rent-controlled, gracious apartment of friends who were in Rome on a fellowship for a year. The women he had over were impressed. Even when he told them the truth of his situation, he implied that he would be looking for the same kind of place once his stay on West Eleventh Street was over.

But it was all downhill after that. He was in one roommate situation after another for a while, and then he found a strange flat on 112th Street with a dark, speckled linoleum floor, worn through in places. It had a tiny bedroom off the even tinier kitchen. The plastic shower stall had been installed sloppily—it tilted—and water collected at its front lip. You had to slosh it back manually toward the drain when you were through showering, something Rafe didn’t always bother doing. There were mice. He thought of the apartment as temporary—but what would change in his life to allow him to move? He didn’t let himself consider this for very long. But because he thought of the place this way, he did nothing to fix it up. He bought only the furniture he had to. He was mostly dating younger women during this time, because they were the only ones who were tolerant of his situation: middle-aged actor, no dough, serious aspirations. But even they found the apartment unattractive and depressing.

And then he fell in love, with a woman almost his age. A painter. The friend of old friends. She was a Southerner, and this was new and exotic to him. She was big, his height or even taller. Her hips were as wide as her vowels, her flesh everywhere soft and abundant. She had family money and a small apartment she kept in the Village where she stayed for a couple of months at a time. She drank a lot, she told dirty jokes, she was smart and gregarious. She needed to be among people. After his work was over, he would meet her at a party somewhere, drink fast to catch up to her, and they’d go back to her place and fuck until one or the other of them essentially passed out.

She was generous with friends and with him. She paid for everything. She bought him gifts. She took him on trips—Key West, New Orleans.

And then one day out of the blue she asked him quietly, innocently, “Lookee here, why don’t you invent something for us to do?” They were in bed. It was Monday morning. The theater was dark today.

“Because. Because, I suppose, you are the mother of invention.”

She frowned, uncharmed. “No, really. Why don’t you … plan a trip for us. Buy us a ticket to Paris France for four days.” Fowah dayze, she said.

“I would, Edie. If I could afford it. Either the days or the dough.”

She rolled onto her side, facing him, her elbow bent, her head resting on her palm. Her big breasts lay one on top of the other. He reached for them, but she brushed his hand away. “You’re really an odd duck, aren’t you?” she said, her voice not friendly. “Most men your age in the arts have either made it, or they’ve found another line of work so they can have a little money.”

He didn’t say anything.

“How have you managed to slide along the way you have all these years?”

“I don’t think about it much.” This was not true. “And then, when I was married, my wife made considerably more than I did, so we got along fine.” He felt embarrassed, so his voice sounded stiff and fussy.

She got up out of bed and pulled her bathrobe on. It was a deep ruby satin kimono with a large dragon embroidered on the back. “Well,” she said. “Yuck.”

And that was that. It was over, quite abruptly. No answering his calls, no calls from her, no more parties, and no explanation at all. He was on his own. It was up to him to figure out the reasons it had ended. He could think of quite a few. Still, it seemed unfair to him. Rude, really.

But wounded as he was, he didn’t have long to dwell on it, because at exactly this time, Lauren started to write to him. What she said was that she had collapsed into a dark depression, she was in intensive therapy. She wanted him back. It had all been her fault. She’d been wrong, she said, to have started the affairs. She had been angry at him but unable to say that. Far from being irrelevant then, her lovers had had everything to do with their marriage. And his having lovers right back had made her more angry, and she’d had more, and on it went until a while after he left, when she realized what she’d done and how angry she’d been all along. How terrified of expressing that she was, how low she had fallen since then.

Now she was slowly working on being more honest—with herself and, she hoped, with him. Would he let her try again?

At first he said no. It felt to him as though it would be a capitulation, an admission of failure in the wider world, of defeat in love, of being old and used up.

But she was persistent, nearly intoxicated, he would have said—he did say it to her later—with her sense of self-discovery, with what she felt was her increased ability to love, to love him. She called and wanted to talk. She kept him on the phone for hours. The letters she wrote him ran to five or six pages.

Well, timing is everything. He came back. To Boston, to Lauren—though he returned in a kind of defeat, though he was still half in love with Edie. But Lauren was so happy that she barely noticed his melancholy, his absence. And slowly he came out of it. Their love-making was new and fresh and sweet, and she wept afterward. She wept to think of what she’d done to their marriage. She wept because she was so happy he’d come back. She wept because he was wearing boxer shorts, which he’d never done before, and she assumed they were the preference of another woman. (She was right: Edie had bought him a dozen pairs and made him throw away his graying jockeys.)

The warmth of her joy over his return, of her grief over what she’d done, was a balm to him. Slowly he recovered from his sense of failure, his pain at Edie’s abrupt turning away from him. Lauren loved him. He had never been so devotedly loved. How could he not enjoy it? How could he not subside into it?

“Who ever gets three chances to love?” she asked him one night. “We have all the luck.”

They were happy again. Once, a while after they’d gotten back together, a good friend asked, in a joking way, “How did this happen anyway?” and Lauren said, only a little in jest, and not without pride, “Oh, I abased myself. Repeatedly.”

——

“Is it a good part, my sweet?”

“It’s the lead. It’s a biggie.” He was putting on her makeup for her. Friends were coming over.

“But good?”

“Very good. Very complicated guy. Not entirely nice. Look up.” She did, and he ran the eyeliner on her lower lids. “I’m onstage the entire time. It begins with me and it ends with me.”

“As I do.”

He looked sharply down at her. She was smiling at him, her newly goofy smile, slightly out of her control now.

“You know,” Edmund said. They were alone in the theater, sitting at a table in the middle of what would be the set, going over his lines with infinite and tedious thoroughness, Edmund’s specialty. “It might well be that he’s doing as much recollecting of Elizabeth here as he is arguing about how we should think about terrorism.”

“So the emphasis should be on the memory of her, of that time in Paris.” This was a question, as he said it.

“I’m just saying,” Edmund answered, “that they might have been having a kind of a nice vacation there together.”

Rafe reread the lines, going a little slower over the memory of Elizabeth, as though he were suddenly, surprisingly, seeing her as he spoke, calling her up.

“Unh-huh,” Edmund said, nodding and nodding and twining his fingers in his beard. And then, just to confound things, “Of course, he’s also trying very hard not to think of her situation right now—the train, the bombing, et alia. Trying to stay in that theoretical world where he’s so comfortable. So maybe the idea is that as he’s making this argument, the John Kerry argument, this memory more or less”—his hand circled in the air in front of him—“catches him unawares, so to speak.”

Rafe read the speech again, thrusting quickly through the lines about John Kerry’s perspective, in full argument mode. Then he paused for a moment, looking down. “I mean, I remember the time when Elizabeth and I were in Paris for four months, that sabbatical year.” Now he spoke more softly. “We traveled everywhere together by subway—by Metro.” He looked up, off in the distance for a second, then back at Edmund. “And it didn’t matter that there’d been a bombing in the subway only a few months before. One lived one’s life, one hoped to have warning, but it was simply there, a possibility.”

“Yup, yup, yup, yup,” Edmund said. “That’s the way. See, this sets up a kind of pattern that helps with the ending, the way he takes her back. You know, that all along he’s had this … awareness, of her, of what he had in loving her.”

Rafe was marking the script, flipping back to the earlier speech, making notes.

“Okay, let’s do it again,” Edmund said.

Afterward, they went out for a drink. They were sitting at the noisy bar in funky old DeLuxe, each with a beer. Edmund tipped his head, bent closer to Rafe, and said, “He’s kind of a funny guy, your Gabriel, isn’t he?” On the television, behind him, the Bruins, dark blobs on white, looped smoothly over the ice.

“How so?” Rafe asked. I’ll bite.

“Well, he plays it pretty close to the vest, don’t you think?”

“You think?”

“Do you?” Edmund’s pale eyes behind his glasses were steady on him.

Rafe swiveled on his seat for a moment. “Well, I was thinking he doesn’t really know what he feels, actually. He knows he doesn’t feel what he’s supposed to feel, but he’s not sure what he does feel, don’t you think?”

“Hunh.” Edmund sat for a long moment, staring down at his beer. He looked up. “Well, I think if it hadn’t happened this way, if it had ended some other way—maybe even if she’d had, say, a heart attack, he might have been able to be glad.” He frowned, he pursed his lips. “No, I don’t mean that,” he corrected himself. “Not glad. But certainly … relieved, to be out of it somehow without inflicting pain. People do feel that sometimes,” he said gravely to Rafe. “It ain’t nice, but it’s so.” He had another swallow of beer. “But this, this is … national. It’s like 9/11. It’s political. It has its claims, doesn’t it? In that there is only one politically correct response to this. Humanly correct. And that just isn’t where his heart is.”

Edmund sat up. “I mean, think of it as if it were like 9/11. Think if you’d been about to ask someone for a divorce, and they upped and died then. The ambivalent reaction to such an event, the complicated one, is shocking to people. No one wants to hear it. It’s … repulsive. It’s unpatriotic.” His fingers nestled into his beard. “It’s small. It’s personal. It’s unworthy. Such a truth needs to be suppressed. He needs to be suppressed.” He banged his fist on the bar.

They both sat, not speaking for a moment. Rafe had some beer.

Edmund said, “Think what a crumb he must feel like.”

That was it, Rafe thought. That Gabriel was trying to figure out a way not to be a crumb, but still to be honest. He wanted somehow to be honorable. That’s what he was doing in that last scene with Anita, figuring that out. That’s what was slowly happening to him.

He was about to say something to Edmund about this, but when he looked over at him, Edmund had turned away to see how the Bruins were doing.

They’d been back together for about two years when the symptoms started. Of course at first they didn’t think of them that way. Just mishaps. She was dropping things, she began taking long naps, naps that left her limp and somehow more fatigued. Sometimes she had a funny garbling of her speech, so that she’d stop and take a deep breath. She’d say, “Allow me to rephrase that,” and repeat something with carefully precise enunciation of each syllable.

They thought mononucleosis, or Epstein-Barr, and she had a few tests, which revealed nothing. It seemed to go away for a while. Over the summer she was herself again. In early August they took a trip to Saratoga Springs. She bought an extravagant hat on the main drag, a hat that would have been worthy of the Queen Mother, as she said. They lost more than one hundred dollars at the track.

On the way home, they stopped to stay a few days with her mother in southwest Vermont, near Bennington College, where her father had taught.

Her mother, Grace, was a poet. A poet manqué, she called herself, because she hadn’t written for years. She said she’d stopped writing because she came to the abrupt realization that there already was an Edna St. Vincent Millay. She said to be a poet manqué was better by far than being a poet because it got you out of the house.

He’d seen pictures of her mother as a young woman. She’d been beautiful, in a Garboesque way—a little androgynous, a little too strong-featured for contemporary taste. Lauren had inherited some of that.

Now she was a wreck, really. Her hair had gone iron gray, cement gray—a bad color, the color of battleships. Her nose, which had been strong and beautiful, was beaky, the nostrils too large, hairs visible in them. She’d been a lifelong smoker, and it showed. Her skin seemed shadowed by nicotine, the long deep creases in her face and around her neck were slightly embrowned. She still smoked occasionally, luxuriating in it, but she made herself go out of her own house to do it now. The news about secondhand smoke had devastated her, and she was determined to do no more harm to her family and friends than she’d already done. She would come back inside smelling strongly of tobacco, chewing gum to make herself less odious.

It had taken Rafe a while to get used to her. He’d grown up in suburban Chicago—the aspiring suburbs, as he put it. Not Winnetka, not Oak Park. His parents were holding on tenaciously, but marginally, to a version of middle-class life that wouldn’t have included anyone like Grace. It was she who’d given the young Lauren the copy of The Joy of Sex that had been their cookbook in their sophomore year. “You should love your body,” she had said on the occasion of its presentation. “Love what it can bring you.”

She’d been a student of Lauren’s father at Bennington. It was a scandal. She got pregnant and he divorced his wife of almost thirty years and married her. Lauren’s half brothers were older than her mother. One of them, Frank, had died the summer before this visit, at seventy-six. The other, Pete, came over with his wife the night before they left.

“Hey, bro,” Lauren said. She was sitting in a chair with her back to the kitchen door, but she’d turned a little when she heard them come in.

Rafe watched as Pete bent over her from behind and kissed the top of her head. His hair was skimpy and white above her face, his skull shiny through it.

“And now”—she stood up, shoving her chair back—“I will embrace you.” She rocked him in her arms. “Oh, oh, sweetie Petie.”

Pete was still rumpled and blushing a little when he shook Rafe’s hand. “Why do you never look any older, Rafe?” he asked.

“It’s a part I’m playing,” he said to Pete. “I’m called on to be about thirty-two.”

“Well, you’re a damn fine actor.”

Lauren was hugging Pete’s wife now. Natalie. Small, with bright, improbably orange hair.

Grace was standing off to one side, waiting her turn at all this embracing. In the wings, he thought.

They went out on the porch and drank martinis, made by Pete, as always. The cat scratched at the screen door, and Natalie let him in. He twined himself around everyone’s legs, then settled by Gracie. They talked about Frank, Pete’s brother. He’d stayed mad at his father after he left his first wife. He wouldn’t enter the house until after the old man had died. “He missed out on a lot of fun,” Grace said.

Rafe had heard the stories. They all drank when Lauren was little, “like fish,” she said. “Exactly as though it was the medium they lived in.” When they were good and drunk, they played games, the games she might have played with other children if any had lived nearby. Sardines, kick the can, red rover. Later word games, board games, guessing games. Botticelli, charades. They wrote operettas and performed them. They danced. They sang. Lauren had once said that it was as though the confusion about the generations had addled them all, made them all about fifteen, max. “When I went to college, I was bereft,” she said. “I looked around and couldn’t figure out where the fun was. Thus, sex.” She made one of her dramatic gestures. “A party you could have with only one other person.”

Now, sitting on the screened porch, they were talking about the retirement community Pete and Nat were about to move to. Nat said, “Pete will be one of three men there. Three men, and I think about forty women. They’ll all be waiting for me to die so they can make their move.”

Grace went out on the stone steps to smoke a cigarette, followed by the cat. She held the door open for him. The breeze was such that the smoke blew back over all of them through the rusty old screens. “Come on and smoke back in here, Momma,” Lauren said. “You’re upwind out there, anyway.”

But Grace wouldn’t. She moved farther away. They could see her drifting around among the old apple trees. Pete offered to freshen up their martinis. “I couldn’t,” Lauren said, and her hand went over her glass just as Pete was about to pour. Rafe shook his head.

“There’s no sense in Nat and me pacing ourselves,” Pete said, filling their glasses. “We got to do everything in a hurry now. Time is closing in on us.”

“You’ll outlive us all, Pete,” Rafe said.

Pete snorted.

Grace came in, trailing the mingled odors of nicotine and Juicy Fruit. They should eat outside, she’d decided. It was too beautiful. So while she fixed their dinner, they all deconstructed the table Lauren had set inside earlier, traipsing back and forth, in and out, with dishes and glasses and silverware and napkins and candles, setting the wooden table on the stone terrace. An old apple tree stretched its gnarled branches above it. Lauren found two citronella candles and lighted them, so there was that to remember later, too—that lemony, camphory smell.

The sun set slowly and dramatically in the west as they ate. They sat in near silence for half an hour or so when they were finished, watching the clouds change color.

“Thanks for that, Gracie,” Pete said as they pushed their chairs back in the near dark and started to clear the table. “You sure have a way with a sunset.”

Rafe and Pete did the dishes. From the living room came the thin, touching music of the scratchy 78s Grace still owned. Someone had stacked up the enormous old record player, and one by one, heavily, the records dropped and the needle moved across them. When Pete and Rafe came in from the kitchen, Grace was kneeling at the open cabinet doors, selecting new discs, and Lauren and Nat were dancing to Lil Hardin Armstrong.

When Lauren saw him, she let Nat go and came to him, lifting her arms. They did a two-step, and then jitterbugged to some swing tune by Duke Ellington. Pete and Nat were dancing too. “The Sheik of Araby” came on. They all tangoed. Then came Fred Astaire and Esther Rollins and Lee Weaver.

Pete and Nat were pooped. They had to go. “You danced us into the ground,” Nat said.

Gracie and Rafe danced a bit more, and then Rafe danced four or five songs with Lauren while Gracie went out to have a smoke. She came back after a bit and sat on the couch, watching them. They were both sweaty, panting and laughing. Finally the record player clicked off, and no one moved to put on any more. It was only about ten-thirty, early by the standards of yore, as Lauren pointed out.

They all sat and talked for a bit, quietly. Then Gracie said, “I have something I need to tell you.” She stopped and made a mischievous face. “And it’s not, you’ll be relieved to know, that I’m pregnant.” It was that she was giving the house up. She was going to join Pete and Nat at the retirement place. The house was already on the market—she would need the money for the entrance fee—but she’d asked them not to put a FOR SALE sign up by the driveway until after Lauren’s visit.

“I feel so awful about this,” she said. “I’d always planned to leave it to you, but it’s nothing but an albatross at this point. I haven’t kept it up worth shit.”

“Oh, Momma,” Lauren said. “Don’t, don’t feel bad. If this is what works for you, this is the right thing.”

“And you know we’re stuck in Boston,” Rafe said. “There’s really no way we could have taken it on, a second home.”

But Grace needed to be penitent about her failures awhile longer. They listened, they reassured her, the women hugged one another, and then they all said good night. Lauren started to put the records away, but Grace turned on the stairs and said, “Don’t. Don’t bother with that, darling. I like to do that in the morning. It’s like having the fun all over again.”

They went to bed, and Lauren wept a little. “My sweet old house,” she said. She smelled of Ivory soap, which was the only brand Gracie ever bought.

In the middle of the night, a complicated, several-stage thud waked him. It was pitch-black, and he couldn’t remember where he was for a moment. Then from somewhere below the bed—from the floor—came Lauren’s voice. “Did I wake you?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said. “What’s happening?”

She laughed. “I seem to have misplaced my knees, Rafe.”

That was the real beginning. In the morning, she couldn’t walk. He had to carry her downstairs, and after breakfast, he helped her to the car. She was dismissive, for Gracie’s sake. She’d pulled something dancing, she said. “You and Pete can apparently pretend to be seventeen with impunity, but not me.”

Each of them hugged Gracie for a moment. They promised to come back soon. Gracie in turn promised she would save everything in the house Lauren might conceivably want.

They drove back to Boston. They were mostly silent. He helped her into a rest stop on the Mass Pike and waited anxiously outside the women’s room.

When she emerged and spotted him, she laughed. “You look like a mole-ster, hovering there,” she said, using her own favored pronunciation of the word. But he’d seen her inching along the wall, and when he reached for her, she almost fell into his embrace. She leaned hard on him all the way back to the car.

After that there were more tests, and then late in the fall the terrible diagnosis. The doctor was kind and patient. He answered everything honestly and said three or four times how sorry he was.

“It is fatal, yes, invariably,” he said, in answer to Lauren’s question. “But there is variability in the length of time it takes. Look at Stephen Hawking.”

They didn’t speak going to the car, starting to drive home. It was a sunny day, a beautiful day. Irrelevant gold and red leaves blew across the street in front of them. She said abruptly, “Look at Stephen Hawking.”

“Swanee …,” he started.

“No. Shut up. Stephen Hawking is like a … disembodied brain,” she said. “Stephen Hawking has a mechanical voice. I am … I am my body. I can’t live without a body.” She was sobbing. “I don’t want to live without my body.”

He spotted a parking space. He pulled over and reached across the console and the stick shift to her.

He held her awkwardly, spoke to her: he loved her. It would be all right. He was with her. He was aware of the stick shift poking his side. He would stay with her. There was nothing that could happen to her—to them—that would make him love her less.

“And sex?” she whispered. “What about sex?” Her eye makeup was streaked down her face. Her mouth was twisted.

“As long as you want me to make love to you, I will want to make love to you.”

A lie. The first of many.

The little playwright was in the first row, watching him and Serena Diglio, who was playing Anita, go through their scene at the end of the second act.

“I have to do this alone,” Rafe said.

“You don’t, have to.”

“I want to do this alone,” Rafe said.

“Hold it,” Edmund said. They both looked over at him. “Does he? Does he want to? Is he telling the truth here?”

There was a silence. Then Rafe said, “So, less conviction?”

“Well, maybe he’s mostly trying to convince himself,” Edmund said. “Okay, sorry. Go ahead.”

“I want to do this alone,” Rafe said, more slowly.

“I don’t believe you,” Anita said.

“You should.”

“Just … answer me one question.”

Rafe turned away, impatient, as he and Edmund had agreed he would be.

“Gabriel? Just one.”

“All right.”

“Tell me honestly, when you heard, didn’t you feel any sense of …” She paused, shook her head. “Forget it.”

It seemed to Rafe that Serena was overdoing this a little, that she was too desperate, too pleading, too early on. But Edmund said nothing, so he said his line, and they moved on.

When he came to the self-pitying lines, “‘Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor man,’” his voice was thick with contempt for himself, and for her. Maybe he was overdoing it, he thought. But Edmund was still just watching.

She went on. She blew a line, and Edmund gave it to her. It’s not greed, what I feel.

“Oh, right,” she said. “That’s a funny one to forget.”

“Yup,” Edmund answered.

She took a breath, her face changed. She said the line.

He answered with his lines about wanting as the human condition, about feeling dead without it.

“But that’s what you said you felt with Elizabeth. Dead.” Her voice was shrill.

“Yes,” he said.

“And with me, you felt alive again.” She was begging him: You said so.

He hadn’t thought of it this way. He had heard her being more assertive. So he said his line more sorrowfully. “Yes. But it was … wanting. Wanting what I didn’t have.”

“Me!” she said. Now assertive.

He took a step back from her. He could see Edmund nod. “Ah, well,” he said. He had his distance again.

“Me,” she insisted.

And then he began his long, slowly developing explanation, something he wanted to be discovering as he went along, in just the way he and Edmund had talked about it—they’d agreed that he was actually feeling his way into his position as he spoke. When he got to his passionate declaration at the end, that he would enact whatever he was called up to be—the widower, the glad husband—at that point, they had agreed, he had it; his feelings had caught up to what he was saying. He’d caught up to himself.

Then her cry, “But you said you loved me.”

Edmund stopped her. He didn’t like it. “You sound like a spoiled little girl, Serena.” He pitched his voice high and whining: “‘You said I could have some candy.’”

She was nodding, looking sheepish. “Yeah, I hear that. But I’m not sure how I should say it.”

Rafe sat down while Edmund and Serena talked about it. He looked over at the playwright, sitting in the second row of seats. Billy Gertz, her name was. Wilhelmina, she’d told him. Yes. That had been their exchange at the meet and greet.

“Billy,” he’d said. “Short for something, I bet.”

“Wilhelmina,” she’d said back, in a stern voice with a German accent, pronouncing the W as a V.

Now she was slouched deep in her seat, making notes. She had her glasses on. Her head barely rose over the back of the seat. She could have been a precocious fifth grader with a thick bowl haircut.

She looked up at him, and he met her eyes. She smiled, raised her hand for a moment, and then went on writing.

“Okay, Rafe,” Edmund said.

He stood up and took his place, and they went over their last lines together. He liked the way Serena said her last line, yelling at him. It sounded full of rage, but you could hear her sorrow, too. She overdid slamming the door, in fun. The set shook. Someone backstage protested: “Hey!”

“Sorry. Joke,” she called, coming back onstage.

They sat down and talked for a while with Edmund, who had suggestions for both of them. Gestures. Emphases. Praise, though, too. He knew how to balance these things, crafty old Ed.

When he was done, he looked down at the playwright. “Anything for these guys, Billy?”

She shook her head. “I might give a few things to you for them tomorrow.”

“Okay then,” Edmund said, turning back to them. He clapped his hands. “Be off with you.”

Serena went backstage, where she’d left her stuff apparently, and Rafe came down into the house to get his jacket. Billy was standing up, shoving things into the big bag she seemed to carry with her always.

“I’m a bit at loose ends,” he said to her.

“Are you now?”

“Do you fancy a drink?”

She slung her bag up onto her shoulder. “Hmm. I think so. Yes. I think that’s the very thing I fancy.”

——

“You smell boozy,” Lauren said. “Brewer-y.”

“Ah! You’re awake.”

“I woke up when I heard you come in.”

Garbled gook, they called it, the way she spoke, but he understood every word. He’d grown into it with her. He leaned over and kissed her. “I had a drink—several drinks, not to put too fine a point on it—with the playwright after work.”

“Fun?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d say. She’s nice.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Actually, Swanee, we talked a lot about the play.”

This was true, surprisingly.

Or not surprisingly. Though Rafe often stayed out in the evenings, away from Lauren, what he did then was drink and talk. He had the perfect life, he often thought, for someone married to an invalid. There was a semisteady supply of fresh blood to listen to his tale of woe. Or of fresh ears. Ear after ear after ear. Just when everyone might have been getting tired of him and his sad story, the play would be over and the faces—the ears—would change.

Not that he always told the sad tale. Tonight, for instance, he hadn’t mentioned it. They had, in fact, talked about the play. And then about Billy. Her life, her history. Why she’d left Chicago, which was, he pointed out, a great theater town.

“Yes, but the problem with Chicago is that what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.”

“Boston’s not so different.”

“Boston’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“Because this play is leaving Boston.”

“Hey, can I come, too?” he’d asked, and she had laughed. She had a good laugh—snarky, quick.

He asked her about the play—where the idea had come from.

“Oh, I dunno. Worcester?” she said. She was drinking Stoli, neat. He was having beer.

“No, really.”

She shrugged. “I guess I was thinking about 9/11. You know.”

“So this is really a 9/11 story?”

“Well, another version thereof. The train version. They seem to like trains, don’t they, those nutty old terrorists. Trains and buses and subways.” She made a little moue. “It seemed … I don’t know. A way to reinvent it.”

“And changing it to Chicago?”

“Oh, I guess that was my imaginary way of”—she gestured—“bringing it home, as it were. My home. I grew up there. Sweet home Chicago.”

“Inflicting it on the Second City.”

She nodded.

“Though we’ve got a pretty small sampling of Chicagoans here,” he said.

“Well, but isn’t two what it always comes down to? Isn’t that where things are felt? In drama. And in life, for Pete’s sake? Chekhov”—she drew herself up—“‘The center of gravity residing in two, he and she.’” She slumped a little, back to normal. “That’s it, don’t you think? The question we all ask of the big event? How am I affected? How are you affected? ‘Where were you when you heard?’” She’d made her voice breathless, avid. “Or ‘I knew someone who knew someone whose husband died.’ And then there’s ‘My husband died.’ Or ‘my wife.’”

“Thus, Gabriel and Elizabeth.”

“Yes, that particular he and she.”

“And who are you, in that story?”

She turned away. She tipped her glass this way and that, and then she looked up at him. “That’s their story, it’s not mine.” She lifted the glass and had a tiny sip.

“But you made it up.”

“I imagined it, yeah. But please, please, give me some credit. Give the imagination some credit. No one really does. No one believes in it anymore. Everything always has to be autobiographical, somehow.”

He thought of Lauren, working on her memoir. Kept alive, as he saw it, by recording her own slo-mo death as it happened to her. She wanted to make use of it in some way, she said.

“So this isn’t autobiography,” he said now to the playwright. “You’re not either one of them.”

“Nor Alex or Emily or Anita. No. Or, I am, but maybe about equally all of them.” She grinned quickly and looked about ten years old. “Which means I’m also none.”

“And you just imagine what it would be like, each situation and each character.”

“That’s my job. Imagining them, imagining what they say and why they say it and how they say it.”

He took a swallow. “So how do you imagine it was on 9/11, for the people who were waiting?”

She was silent for what seemed to him a long moment before she answered. Finally, she said, “Well, that all depends, doesn’t it?”

“On what?”

“Ah. Well, I guess how … you know, how some people embrace disaster. Zoom right into the worst scenario: Oh God, it’s my wife! And others think, Well, she could have gotten out. Or, Maybe he was late to work. Or, She could have missed the train. She’ll call.”

“Denial.”

“I suppose.” She took another tiny sip of Stoli.

“Like, I guess … yeah,” he said. “I’m remembering all those posted notices, you know?” She looked at him. “Sort of as though the victims might be lost somewhere. Might just be having a tiny bit of trouble remembering how to get home. What was that but evidence of the way people can just find reasons, or ways, not to believe a terrible thing?”

“So do you think that’s part of Gabriel’s response?” Billy asked.

“No. Actually I don’t, no. I think he believes she’s dead, right away. Because I think that’s the kind of guy he is.”

“Well, then, if you think so, that’s who he is. So, what difference will that make in how you play him?”

“Well, it’s not quite like The End of the Affair, is it? Did you see that?”

“I saw it, I read it. But I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, Gabriel’s not like the woman in that story. He’s not about to pray for her return, the way she did for her lover. To make a deal for her return. He just … it’s just something that makes him examine himself—his own responses. What he wants, most deeply.” He lifted his shoulders. “Maybe that’s the contemporary version of religious conversion—self-examination.”

She laughed, and he did, too.

“So how would you say the last line?” he asked.

“The last line being ‘Elizabeth’?”

“Yeah. What are my choices, as you see them?”

She made a funny face and lifted her hands. How would I know?

“I mean, is he glad? Is he … feeling trapped? What?”

“Sure.” She dragged the word out. “All of the above.”

He grinned. “You’re no help, are you?”

“You’re the actor, dear heart.” She was smiling now, too.

He lifted his glass. “Indeed I am,” he said.

“Ah, you’re married,” she said. She was pointing to the ring on his finger.

“Yes. Very.”

She exhaled through closed lips, a dismissive noise. “There’s married and there’s not married. No such thing as very.”

“You’re wrong there.”

“Well, if you’re so very married, why are you here, having this drink?”

She didn’t say having this drink with me, he noted, but that’s what she meant. And he didn’t know the answer to that. But he said, “I often have a drink after work. My wife goes to bed early.”

“Ah.”

And that was as close as he’d come to the sad tale, tonight. A little bit later, she’d swung down off the bar stool and said she had to get home to walk her dog. He’d watched her out the window as she crossed the street, a little figure, all in black, disappearing quickly into the dark of Union Park, the fanciest of the little private parks studding this neighborhood of Boston. He’d stayed on by himself, talked a bit to the bartender about the Red Sox—who they might sign, who they’d let go—and then he drove home.

Now he lay next to Lauren in the dark. She was motionless, quickly back in her deep sleep. Dreaming, maybe. Dreaming of the way she used to be.

A few weeks ago he’d been getting something for her from her desk, and he’d read the top page of her memoir in progress. She was describing a dream she’d had, a dream of running. “In my dream, my body worked perfectly. My breathing was unstrained and full and slow. My legs were weightlessly muscled. My knees rose high in front with each step, my heels kicked high behind me, everything was smooth and effortless. I woke to the sound of my own laughter, as grateful and happy as we are when we conjure some long-dead friend or lover in our sleep and get to talk with them or touch them once more.”

Now she lay propped up on her pillows in her drugged sleep next to him, her body immovable as a dead woman’s—only her labored, thick breathing attesting to the life it still held, captive.

A month or so after they got the diagnosis, Grace had called and asked them if they’d take her cat. The house had sold, and she was moving, but she couldn’t take the cat with her. Belle-Vue had a no-pet policy. She’d tried giving him to a younger friend, but the woman’s son turned out to be allergic.

Rafe’s first impulse was to say no. He and Lauren were still in a fragile state, one or the other of them likely at any time to begin to weep—though Lauren had already begun, too, to sometimes make a quick, biting joke about it. But he said to Grace that he’d talk to Lauren and get back to her.

Lauren wanted to take him. She would be home more of the time, and Marsh—short for Marshmallow—would be nice company. They decided Rafe would drive over and get him, and while he was there, break the news to Grace that Lauren had ALS. Lauren said she knew this was a rotten thing to ask him to do, but that she couldn’t possibly do it herself: “I’d just as soon take a knife out and stab her about a dozen times.”

So Rafe set out on a Monday morning in mid-December. It was snowing, but the really heavy stuff wasn’t supposed to start until nightfall, by which time he’d be at Gracie’s, safely off the road. And by the time he headed back, after breakfast on Tuesday, the roads would have been cleared.

There was something hypnotic about the drive. There was almost no traffic on the Pike, so Rafe didn’t have to think much about what he was doing. The snow came at the windshield steadily, and the wipers kept a constant rhythm. The road gradually turned white. He stayed in the one lane where there were tire tracks. Occasionally he passed a plow, throwing up wet clumps of brownish slush. He was relieved to be away from Lauren. He had the sense mostly of that, of being on the road, going away. He listened to music, he kept his mind empty.

Route 9 across Vermont was slow, busy with local traffic and occasionally slippery. Twice he scared himself with a long skid. When he got to Bennington, he stopped and had a drink in a bar. There was a giant television mounted high on the wall in the corner with the volume turned off. Men in football uniforms ran this way and that. There were two couples lingering at tables, having finished lunch a while earlier, he supposed. The snow fell steadily on the empty street outside the plate-glass window. He had another drink. He wanted nothing more than he wanted to stay there and have one after another until he was shit-faced, but after those two, he paid up. He stopped at a liquor store in town and bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and then he drove to Grace’s.

The field around her house was unreasonably beautiful. The day was still, no wind, and the snow had collected evenly on every branch of the twisted old apple trees, of the swooping birches bent low under it; it had settled thick and white on the dark green of the mammoth pines at the bottom of the meadow. He sat for a while after he cut the engine, thinking about missing this, thinking about losing it, about losing Lauren, losing Grace, losing Pete and Nat. It seemed more than he could bear, this beauty, and all this loss.

He saw Grace’s face, blurry and white, moving across the living room window. He got out of the car. The snow was about a foot deep, soft, light. He retrieved his overnight bag from the backseat. As he came up the walk, she opened the door.

“My favorite son-in-law,” she said.

“Hello, Gracie.” They kissed, she held him and patted his back heartily, as if she were burping a baby. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair smelled a little oily.

While he went to hang his coat up, he looked around. The rooms were nearly bare, but he’d expected this—she’d given away or sold everything but what she was taking with her to the retirement place, and they’d been consulted every step of the way. Earlier in the fall, before Lauren was diagnosed, he had come over in a rented van with a friend and taken some stuff back to Boston—an old chair Lauren liked, books, china and linens, boxes of photographs, silver, candlesticks, the worn quilts she’d grown up with.

Now their voices ricocheted around the rooms, their footsteps sounded hollow and ominous on the naked floors. Grace had some boxes she wanted him to bring downstairs, and he did that. Then he got the snowblower out of the garage and cleared the front walk and the porch—Tim Holloran would come by when the snow stopped, late tonight or early tomorrow, to plow the driveway out.

When he came back in, it was already getting dark. He could smell meat cooking—roasting beef or pork. He went into the kitchen. He’d resolved to tell her before dinner. He couldn’t sit across the table from her and eat and make small talk and then spring it on her.

She was peeling potatoes at the sink, her back to him, her arms and hands in steady, tight motion.

“Come have a drink with me, Gracie,” he said.

“Can’t,” she said without looking up or stopping what she was doing. “I want to get this stuff going. Then I’ll get looped.”

“I need to talk to you. Come on and have a drink now.”

She looked sharply at him and set the peeler down at the sink. “I don’t like the sound of this,” she said.

“No, it’s not good.”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and came over to the table. She sat and he poured a tumbler full for each of them. She had a swallow, and then she said, “You’re not splitting up again, are you?”

“No.” They were almost at right angles to each other. “No, this is about Lauren.” He didn’t look at her. “She’s been diagnosed with a disease.” He heard a little intake of breath. “A wasting disease.” He’d decided on these words a few days ago, after Lauren asked him to do this.

“A wasting disease? What disease?” She pushed her glass away.

“It’s ALS.”

She shook her head.

“Amytrophic lateral sclerosis.” He pronounced it slowly. “ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Remember when she was having trouble getting around last summer? When I had to carry her?” Her eyes were unwavering on his face. He tried to meet them. “Well, that was a sign of it.”

“I’ve heard of this disease,” Grace said. “But I don’t know what happens to you. What will happen?”

“She will get weaker, progressively. She will need … help. She may, in the later stages, even need help eating, or breathing.”

Gracie’s mouth opened. Then she said, “So, she’s going to die from this.”

“She will.” He was looking down at his hands.

“How long does she have?”

He shrugged. “I guess it’s different from case to case, and for that reason the doctors won’t say, at this point. But we’ve read about it, and it could be three years. Maybe five years. It’s certainly a few years off. She’s still able to do most everything now.”

“But … this is so terrible.” Grace’s face was awful to look at.

“It is,” he said. He reached over to take her hand.

She drew in a deep breath now, and expelled it. “I believe I’ll go upstairs for a bit.” She shoved her chair back.

“Take this.” He filled her glass almost to the brim, and handed it to her.

She took it. At the door, she turned partway back. “You might get the potatoes on, sliced, in boiling water.”

“Okay,” he said. He was near tears. He wanted her to go, so he could cry. For her, for Lauren, for himself.

She must have sensed this. Or maybe not. At any rate, she said, “I’m so sorry for you, dear, having to tell me this.”

“Well, I’m … sorry, too.”

But when she left, he didn’t cry. He drank some more scotch, he peeled the potatoes and put them on to boil, he checked on the roast. He saw the baster sitting out on the counter next to the stove, so he basted it, just in case. This was how he’d been functioning for weeks now. Oh, this foot? You put it down in front of the other one. Now he moved his chair over by the window and sat, his drink in his hand, watching the slow fat snowflakes descend.

He didn’t hear Grace come down, but suddenly music blared forth from the living room—horns and voices from the thirties or forties.

He turned, and she was in the kitchen, the cat trailing her.

“We’re not having any vegetables,” she announced. “The hell with them. Just meat and potatoes, that’s all I feel like doing tonight.” She went to the oven and opened it.

“Then that’s all I feel like eating,” he said.

She took the roast out of the oven and set it on the counter. “And we’ll drink.”

“I’m ahead of you there,” he said.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked. She was at the sink pouring the steaming water off the potatoes. “I mean, in general?”

“Not so much. Lauren thinks it makes her speech worse, plus she’s on some med for depression, which means, I guess, that she’s really not supposed to.” He had another sip of scotch. “But tonight is different. Let’s get wrecked.”

“I am wrecked, whether I drink or not. But yes, let’s have a few. Let’s get blotto.”

He set the table while she mashed the potatoes. She put the food on the table and went back to the living room to restack the records. They ate, listening to the music, and then it stopped. They talked in a desultory way, always about Lauren, about the disease. Grace wanted to help. She spoke of coming for a week or so each month, once Lauren needed her. She seemed, so quickly, to have taken it in, to have accepted it.

But as they stood side by side, doing the dishes, she stopped and turned to him. “How will I go on living, after she dies?”

He couldn’t think of an answer. He just stood there, and then he shook his head, and she went back to the dishes.

Later, they danced a little, and then he helped her pack up the records—Lauren had said she wanted them.

In the night, he heard Tim Holloran plowing the driveway, he saw the headlights of his truck rake the ceiling. When he woke again, to a muted light, his mouth was dry, and he had a headache. Aspirin, and then coffee helped.

He packed the car. Grace had more stuff for him to take than he’d counted on. The cat would have to ride in his carrier in the front seat. He took two bananas and left without eating breakfast. Maybe the roads would be plowed, maybe they wouldn’t, but he couldn’t bear to stay any longer in the emptied house with this flattened, silent version of Grace. And he thought it was likely that she wanted him to go, that she needed to be alone.

As he turned at the bottom of the long driveway, he saw that she was still standing where he’d left her, watching him out of sight.

The first preview performance had only a few glitches. Annie, the actress playing Emily, dropped her glass of fake bourbon and it broke, and Bob—Alex—flubbed a line but covered for it nicely. Rafe felt he gave an off-kilter emphasis to “Elizabeth,” his last line—the play’s last line. It seemed to him, just after he’d said it, that it sounded as though he didn’t recognize his own wife.

No one was interested to discuss this with him at the bar afterward, where most of the cast and some of the crew had gathered for a celebratory drink. A few spouses were there.

He talked to Billy. Just as she was about to turn away, she asked him, “Hey, where’s your wife, to whom you’re so very married?”

“I told you, she goes to bed early.”

“Every single night?”

“She’s an invalid, actually. She’s not well.”

Her face fell. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, we’re sorry, too.”

“But I’m sorry also because I was sort of … teasing you, and that’s, that’s just … inappropriate.”

He knew what she was saying—that she’d been flirting, that she’d been teasing him sexually. “Ah, it’s okay. I miss being teased.”

“I suppose one would.”

“One does.”

Later, as things were breaking up, he found her. “Want some help walking your dog?” he asked.

“You can come along if you like. My dog actually mostly walks himself. And it’s a quick walk at night. Strictly business, as it were.”

They went halfway into Union Park and up the steps of one of its grand brick bowfronts. She let them into the front hallway where a staircase rose splendidly and vanished into the upper reaches of the house. She opened one of the double doors into what once must have been the town house’s parlor.

A black shape bounded forward out of the dark toward her. The dog was enormous. As she spoke to it enthusiastically, it rose on its hind legs and rested its front paws briefly on her shoulders. Its head was almost at the height of hers. Its tail was wagging frantically. They seemed to be smiling at each other.

The dog dropped and then came to Rafe and poked him with his nose once, approximately in the groin.

He asked her what the breed was, and she said she’d been told a mix between a Newfoundland and something else maybe even bigger. “Though what that could be, I don’t know.”

“He is unbelievably huge,” Rafe said.

“Yes. I thought I’d get the least appropriate dog for a person my size that I could find.” She turned away. “Let’s get your leash,” she said conversationally to the dog.

She stepped into the dark room, and Rafe and the dog followed. The parlor was vast, high-ceilinged. He saw double pocket doors, partially pushed back, and beyond them another room and windows.

The dog stood patiently while she hooked the leash to his collar, and they went outside. They strolled down to the corner, where patrons still lingered in the glass box of a ground-floor restaurant, and then they walked slowly back. The dog must have lifted his leg twelve times.

She asked him if he’d like to come in for a drink.

“I’ve had a few.”

“One more, then.”

He hesitated. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”

“That’s what I like,” she said. “Unbridled enthusiasm.” She was unlocking the front door.

“Sorry,” he said.

Inside, she turned on a lamp and disappeared into a galley kitchen off the parlor. She brought out two glasses and a bottle of wine. “If you’d open it,” she said, handing him the corkscrew, “I’ll put some music on.”

While he peeled the casing off the bottle and twisted the corkscrew in, she squatted by a wide console and loaded some CDs into a player. Piano music, jazz, suddenly blared in the room, too loud.

“Oops,” she said, and turned it down. He didn’t recognize the tune or the player.

She came and sat at the other end of the long couch. She put her feet on the scarred coffee table. It was round, it looked like an old oak dining room table someone had cut down. Books and magazines were arranged in piles on it.

He handed her a glass and lifted his own. “Cheers,” he said.

“To us,” she said. “To the first real performance.”

After one sip, he set his glass down. He really didn’t want any more. “Weren’t you intimidated, writing about 9/11?” he asked.

“Well, of course, it’s not 9/11, it’s the Lake Shore Limited.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. He leaned back. “I happen to know it’s 9/11. I got it straight from the playwright.”

She smiled at him, tilting her head. “Yeah, you did.” She breathed in, loudly. “The thing is,” she said, “I have great creds.”

“Nine-eleven creds?”

“Ah-huh. I’m a kind of almost widow.” She looked over at him. “A lover died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” She sat silently for a moment. Then she smiled, a little bitterly, he thought. “But it gives me impeccable authority. Almost as good as Rudy Giuliani’s.”

He laughed. “And are you thinking of running for president, too?”

“I have a life that’s as close as I want to get to a public one. And after 9/11, it was too public, for a while.”

“Were you beleaguered?”

She looked at him sharply for a second. “Nice word. That would be apt. I was, briefly. They quoted me in his little Times piece—my name, that I lived in Boston—and after that, for a while, I got calls whenever they wanted a statement, a response from, you know, a bereaved relative, or quasi-spouse. Fiancée, I was called, officially. Though that wasn’t true. But that came from his sister, so I didn’t correct it. And then his sister, of whom I’m very fond, she wanted me to be with her at various functions. Memorial things. It was hard to say no, so I didn’t say no. And I had to talk to other people on those occasions, too. His sister actually wanted me to have some of the money when it came.” She sighed deeply.

“People think they know what you’re feeling.” Her voice was softer, suddenly. “What you must be feeling. And because it’s easier not to expose yourself, what you’re truly feeling, you don’t disabuse them. You go through the motions for them. That’s why, I think, I wanted to write the play—about a man who doesn’t feel what he’s supposed to. Who has an entirely too-confused response to it for lots and lots of reasons. So he can’t show … anything, almost.”

“Well, that helps me, actually. Thinking about a couple of things in it.”

“Good. Anything that helps.”

They sat, listening to the music. Or he was listening to the music. He looked at her. “But what were you feeling, that you weren’t supposed to?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I just didn’t feel … It’s not important, really. I was … It’s just, there’s this set of things everyone expects of you. That’s all.”

They sat silent for a moment. Rafe felt strained, a bit. He asked, “What was he like? Your, almost fiancé?”

“He was … good. He was sweet.”

Rafe made a face.

“I know. But he was. He was kind, sweet. He was a little younger than I was.” She swung her knees up sideways onto the couch and turned so she was facing him. “He was a prep school English teacher. I went to the memorial service at his school, and to a boy, to a girl, his students were weeping. Straight through it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, except for me.” She laughed, lightly. “I was always more than a little aware of my great unworthiness around him.”

“Well.” He nodded several times. He was thinking of his own unworthiness, of the variety of ways, daily, that he failed Lauren.

As if she’d read his thought, she asked, “And your wife? What’s she like?”

He shrugged. “She was wired. Funny. Lively.” He shrugged again. “Great legs.”

“You’re using the past tense.”

“Yeah, I am. Even the legs are a little …” He thought of them—white, flaccid. “They’ve lost what I’ve learned to call tonus.”

She was silent for a moment. “You seem very distant from her.”

He thought she sounded sad about this, perhaps compassionate. At any rate, not judgmental. He had a sudden sense of relaxing with her. “I am, of necessity, very distant from her. She really is … her real intimacy, at this point, is with the illness. And I, to keep going, I have to more or less ignore the illness. We’re at cross purposes. I think she feels … that I’ve left her alone with it. And I suppose I have.”

“And the illness is?”

“Lou Gehrig’s disease. Stephen Hawking,” he said. He smiled. “Or, as she calls him, Fucking Stephen Hawking.

“She’s writing about it, you know.” He nodded. “Yep. A memoir. She’s got some elaborate voice-activated software. I’ve seen a bit of it here and there. I think she’d like me to want to read it. And I don’t. It’s the last thing on earth I want to read. While she’s alive. Maybe I will after she’s dead. I’ll read it and weep, as they say. For now …” He shook his head. “Yeah, I keep my distance.”

The CD had changed. The piano was slow now. Some old Fats Waller tune, he thought. Probably he and Lauren had the original version on one of Gracie’s 78s.

“But you love her.”

“I loved her. And because of that, I love her. Yes.”

She looked at him, her head tilted. “You must be very lonely.”

He laughed, quickly. “I need to get a dog, I guess.”

She smiled. “It works, you know. A dog. To a degree.”

“We have a cat. Though he’s more my wife’s companion.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Then she said, “Would you like to make love? Since you can’t have a dog.” She was smiling, her lips slightly parted.

“I would,” he said. He looked directly at her. “I’m not sure I can.” He smiled, too, but ruefully. “This hasn’t been the most erotic lead-in I could imagine.”

“You never know,” she said, and leaned forward to set her glass down on the table.

He followed her back to the two pocket doors. As he stepped into the darker room, she spoke to the dog, who had started to follow, too. “Stay, Reuben.”

He dropped instantly and laid his head on his front paws. A worried moan escaped from him.

“Get real,” she said.

She slid the doors shut. They were in a smaller room, maybe half the size of the living room. It would have been the back parlor before the house was divided. Tall windows opened onto a closed-in space behind the house, some sort of yard. There were nineteenth-century gas lamps dimly glowing through the branches of the trees, and their faint light fell into the room. There was a bed against the wall, made up, with a patchwork quilt on top.

They undressed on opposite sides of it, like a couple who’ve been married for years. She lifted the covers and got in on her side, moving to the middle of the bed, turned toward him. Her face was in shadow, but he could feel her eyes on him.

He slid in toward her, and they were touching. Her body was small—so much smaller than Lauren’s—and tensed, muscular. He moved his hands over her limbs, her buttocks, her breasts in a kind of astonishment. Everywhere she was quick and alive, responsive. Her muscles jumped under his touch; her tendons were like tight wires. She radiated heat, energy.

He could have wept.

He was hard, almost right away. “I don’t have anything,” he said. His breathing was audible, quickened. “A condom. I don’t have one.”

“I do,” she answered. She rolled away from him and reached out to the bedside table. He heard the drawer open. She turned back and moved over him, swinging a leg up, then straddling him. He could see in the dim light that her breasts were surprisingly plump. She settled herself on his thighs, and tore the condom package open. She was expert with it, stroking him with warm hands while she also unrolled the sheath down over him. He moaned in pleasure.

She rose up onto her knees and moved forward. He watched what her hands were doing, holding his stiff penis, easing it into herself. When she was fully lowered onto him, when he was completely inside her, she arched her back and began to move herself slowly up and down. Her buttocks and her thighs tightened rhythmically with her motion.

He held her hips and helped her move faster. Her breasts jounced. He was wild with excitement. He started to come, much too soon, too fast. As he pushed into her harder, longer, she answered him with her body, and she rode him steadily until he was through, until they both slowed, and then he stopped. She sat, panting for a minute. Then she laughed, a short exhalation. They stayed like this, breathing hard. Billy was still moving, a gentle rocking.

He slipped out of her, finally. She lay down on him then, closing her thighs around him, moving her hips a little from side to side. Their breathing evened out. They rested for a bit, and then she moved up on his body. She kissed him. He held her. Her legs were open across him. He could feel her knees pressed in on either side of his rib cage and her warm dampness on his belly. A little while later, she slid off him, and they lay next to each other.

He turned on his side to look at her, to touch her. Her eyes were black in the dark room. How small she was under his hands, and perfect. And yet the full breasts, the thick dark bush. His fingers brushed over her nipples, and they stiffened.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“Uh-oh.”

“No, I like your play. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” She laughed. “It’s close to everything.”

“I’m glad I got around to saying it then.” He was touching her everywhere now—her breasts, her nipples, her hips, her abdomen. He couldn’t get enough of the way she felt.

“Strange, then, that an act of sex is what loosed your tongue.” Her voice was dreamy.

He slid his hand down her belly and pushed two fingers through her thick curly hair into the slick warmth of her. Her eyes had closed. He found her clit with his thumb and began a circling motion on it. Now she opened her eyes. She was breathing faster. “It must be that the fabulousness of … same, reminded you.”

“No doubt.” He played with her for a while, spreading her wetness with his fingers to make everything slippery, everything easy.

He slid down on the bed. He spread her legs wide apart, opening her for himself with his fingers, putting his face down onto her, onto her taste, her smell, using his mouth, his tongue. Her hips began to move, pressing up against him. He moved his fingers over her clitoris, he held it pushed up so he could pull on it with his whole mouth. She moaned. He thrust his fingers in and out of her.

She cried out sharply over and over when she came, raising her hips off the bed, pushing herself convulsively against his mouth, his face. As she finished, her motion ebbed, and finally she lay still. He turned his face to the side, feeling the soft fur, wet now, on his cheek. He kept his fingers in her, moving them slowly in and out. “Oh,” she said. “This is so sweet.”

He laughed lightly. After a little while, he moved up so that he was lying next to her. He helped her pull the covers over both of them. He slept for a while. He woke. The clock’s red numerals said 2:12.

When he got up to leave, she stirred and got up, too. He’d thought she was asleep. She pulled on the robe that had been hanging on the door to the bathroom and came out with him into the parlor. The dog rose when the doors opened and stood, alert, waiting to see what would happen next.

She crossed to the hall door with Rafe. “This was so lovely,” she said. She was almost whispering.

“It was.” He kissed her, bending down to meet her tipped-up face. He’d forgotten again how small she was.

“I love your mouth,” she said. “Thank you for your mouth. Among all the rest of your very nice things.”

He didn’t know what to say.

She stepped back from him. “Are you going to be worried about this?” she asked gently.

He didn’t answer. His shoulders rose a little.

“Rafe, this was two lonely people consoling each other. I was lonely. I feel wonderfully consoled. That’s what I hope you feel.”

He nodded. He spoke. “Yes. Yes, I do. Indeed I do.”

“Please, please don’t worry about this. You strike me as a worrier. Don’t … let me—or this—become a worry. I won’t be. I’m not. It’s not. It was just for now, just for us. Our one-night stand. Just a wonderful onetime event. Wonderful for me, at any rate.”

“No, for me, too,” he said. He kissed her, and her arms came around his waist. She rested her head on his chest. He cupped it there for a few seconds, liking the way the smooth cap of her hair felt.

“And that’s that,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it has to be,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you for saying that.”

She stepped back and curtsied.

As he opened the door to the hall, he looked back at her. She was standing with the dog just beyond the slant of hall light that fell in. She looked like a child, but a mythical child, a child in a fairy tale, guarded by some large wild animal—a black bear. A griffin. She raised her hand as he left.

The night air was cold, and the streets were empty, except for the occasional cab and a pedestrian here and there. His car had a ticket, which he shoved into the glove compartment. There were several others in there—he’d have to pay up soon, or he’d get booted.

He drove up Mass Ave, almost the lone car. Every single light turned red for him, all the way. He didn’t mind. He wanted it to take forever, getting home. He knew what was awaiting him—the sense of shame, the sense of having wronged Lauren. But as long as he was in transit, only on his way, he could hold that off, he could be just here, his body awake to itself for the first time in more than a year, his vivid sense memories—of Billy’s body opening to him, moving in response to him—not yet what he mustn’t allow himself.

At the Mass Ave bridge, he looked over at the lights of the city, the purple spokes of the Zakim Bridge, its reflection doubled, spangled in the choppy water of the river. He drove past MIT. He turned south on Pearl. The streets of Cambridgeport closed around him, sleeping, silent. At home, the porch light had gone off.

Inside, he took his shoes off. Marsh came to him and leaned against his leg. He bent down and stroked him. In the dark kitchen, he washed his face. He took off his shirt and washed his upper body, too, shivering in the cold. The bones of his bare feet clicked against each other as he moved into the living room. He left his jeans on a chair.

But when he opened the bedroom door and felt the weight of the warm, moist air, heard the noise of the humidifier whirring, he didn’t want to go in, he didn’t want to lie down next to the motionless form that was Lauren. Gently he closed the door again and went to stretch out on the couch, pulling the old afghan from Gracie around himself.

At five, Lauren called out, her voice panicky.

She was angry, he could tell as he helped her out of bed. She didn’t even grunt hello, she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

When he helped her lower herself onto the toilet, she said, “You have to come home.”

“I was home,” he said. “I came home. I didn’t want to wake you, but I was here.” Even though this was true—partly true—he felt like a liar saying it. He was a liar saying it.

“But I didn’t know that.” She started to cry. She hadn’t cried in a long time. “I have to know I’m not alone,” she said.

He bowed his head quickly. “Yes, you’re right,” he said. He fumbled for a Kleenex. He wiped her eyes, her nose. “I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m so sorry.” He was imagining how it must have been for her, the physical terror of abandonment as well as the other, the idea of what he might be—must be—doing. What he’d done, for Christ’s sake. And always the possibility—could she think it?—that he simply wouldn’t come back, ever. Probably she could think it, yes. And that’s what he deserved.

When she had peed, when he’d wiped her, he supported her back to bed and lay down next to her. Marsh came in and jumped up onto the bed, walking back and forth across them until he found a good spot, curled against Lauren’s side.

Rafe told her a long story about barhopping with Edmund and Serena.

She said she was sorry. She shouldn’t have let herself think about him the way she had. But she’d been so alone, so scared.

He stroked her hair, her face, he held her hands. He felt the quick-flickering memories of Billy’s body, of his hands on her, but he kept the same hands slow and comforting on Lauren. He whispered to her, saying her name, saying he loved her, over and over, until they both fell back to sleep. They didn’t wake again for more than two hours.

That evening, friends came over for dessert and coffee and brandy. This was how they’d solved the problem of entertaining now that Lauren could no longer cook—or for that matter really even eat in public. It also made the evening shorter and less tiring for her.

They talked about the Sox, about Ben Affleck’s new movie, set in Dorchester. The topics jumped around. The problem was that even these good friends—and Mary was one of the people in the Round Robin: she saw Lauren once every two weeks or so—even they had trouble understanding her speech now. Mary knew enough to keep her eyes on Lauren while Rafe translated, but Victor openly turned to him every time Lauren started to speak. Gradually she stopped trying.

It was amazing to Rafe, given Lauren’s immensity in his own life, how quickly she was simply erased socially, even for him. They talked on without her, around her, as though she weren’t there.

Once she said something clearly. They were speaking of Norman Mailer’s death, and she said, “He was an asshole.”

They all laughed, and Rafe felt a pang, looking at her face, to see how pleased she was to be understood, to have amused them, even with this minimal, crude remark. Lauren, one of the most amusing people he knew.

“How can you say that?” Victor said. “He wrote at least a couple of really great books.” Victor taught literature at BU.

“I don’t care,” she said, and Rafe began to translate again. “He emerged in an era when most men were assholes about women, and he didn’t bother to notice that about himself. Just the opposite. He embraced it. He argued for it.”

But after this moment in the conversation, they moved on. Mary asked about Rafe’s play, and he told her that it seemed to be starting off well. No, it hadn’t been produced elsewhere, but it was going out after this run.

“Ah, so will you go with it?” Victor asked.

“No.” He shook his head, and looked over at Lauren quickly. Her eyes were unmoving on him. “No, I stay put. I have a couple of other things in the works.”

They talked a bit longer. Lauren was completely silent now, and finally Mary looked at her and said, “It is getting late. Work for all of us tomorrow, no?”

They stood up. They gathered their things. They both bent to kiss Lauren good-bye, and Mary said, “See you next Thursday, right?”

Lauren nodded, and Mary and Victor ambled conversationally with Rafe to the door.

He came back and got her into bed. She was exhausted. He cleaned up. Then he had another brandy and read through the second act of the play, thinking of what Billy had said about her reasons for writing Gabriel as he was, thinking about what Gabriel felt and what he didn’t.

He thought of Lauren. The memories Gabriel had of Elizabeth, he thought—bright, funny, difficult, exciting—must be a bit like his memories of Lauren. Submerged, but always there, under the Lauren he lived with, the Lauren he took care of, or tried to. Just as Gabriel’s remembered Elizabeth was somewhere under the distant woman he lived with.

It had taken him this long to see that the play was about him. Denial, indeed.

He set the script down and allowed himself to think about Billy. Her conversation. He remembered, too, the way she came, the way her small strong body moved convulsively in the dim light of her bedroom. He reached up for the lamp next to the couch and turned it off. He was aroused, but he didn’t touch himself. He told himself it wasn’t likely they’d sleep together again. He didn’t think he could. He had felt too awful about Lauren. Admittedly only afterward, not during, but he knew he couldn’t bear another morning like this last one—the way she’d felt, the way he felt.

Billy had seemed to sense those feelings rising in him just before he left. She’d been kind, given everything. He shook his head: what a lugubrious fuck he’d become. In several possible senses of the phrase.

He sighed and got up. He undressed. He went into the bedroom and got into bed next to Lauren. She didn’t stir.

The next evening, when he came into the living room to say good-bye, Lauren said, “We shouldn’t try anymore.” He must have looked startled, because she said quickly, “Socially.”

He sat down. “Look,” he said, “I know it wasn’t good last night. But that was my fault. I let it happen. I should have made it easier for you to be part of it.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t say that. It’s too much for you to manage it all.” She turned in her chair a little, as though she were uncomfortable. “After all, I have friends. I can talk to them.” Her head moved slightly, a gesture toward the kitchen, where Carol, who’d come to spend the evening with her, was washing dishes, the water running steadily. “I can make it work, one on one. And that’s the way I want to see people from now on.”

“I don’t agree with you.”

She smiled. “That’s too bad. ’Cause that’s the way I want it.”

“I think we should keep at it. Keep trying.”

She gave an exasperated moan. “I don’t want to keep trying. That’s just it.”

“Okay,” he said. He stood up, looking at her. After a moment, he said, “If you change your mind, though …”

“I won’t,” she said.

He put his coat on.

“Poor you,” she said. She was smiling again, a smile that almost worked, and reminded him of her as she’d once been.

“Not,” he said, smiling back.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s such hard work, being Lauren’s hubby.”

“I love you.”

Tears sprang suddenly to her eyes. “It must be awful, then, to sometimes wish me dead.”

He was shocked. He came over to her, knelt by her chair, and reached up to her face. “I never wish you dead.”

“Ah, liar,” she said clearly. “I sometimes wish me dead, so I know you must.”

The answers came to his mind, all the things he had said so often. That no matter what, she was always the same to him, that he loved her, that he loved her no less now. That he cherished every moment with her. That, as he had just finished saying, he never wished her dead.

He didn’t say any of them.

After a moment, he said, “None of that is important.”

She seemed almost startled for a few seconds. Then she said, “I know.”

When he turned at the door, leaving, she said, “Do well tonight.”

They seemed a little off, a little slow in the first act. The day away from it, maybe. For himself, there was a sense of bringing new information to Gabriel, Billy’s information. And somehow—he felt this in an inchoate, unreasoned way—all of his own experience these last few days, with Billy, yes, and with Lauren, too.

In the second-act argument with Anita near the end of the play, the long argument over what Gabriel felt he should do and feel, he was hearing the exchange differently, responding differently. It changed her responses. It could have been bad, but he experienced it as a kind of clicking, the moment he always looked for in acting, with each role—when he felt the full meaning of the play in every line. Like a mathematical proof, he’d sometimes said of this feeling, trying to explain it to a friend. Or a piece of music. It was of a whole to him, like that. He felt as he said Gabriel’s lines that he was truly understanding them. He had the sense of being Gabriel—Gabriel, accepting the implications for him of Elizabeth’s fate, whatever it was to be. Accepting the randomness of terror’s reach into her life as his fate. Choosing this—acceptance—over what suddenly seemed paltry in the possibility of his own action: the mere saying yes or saying no to his marriage. And he was experiencing this not as passivity, but as a kind of daring risk taking, necessary to him. He was excited, speaking the lines.

He could feel Anita’s surprise and confusion, but that, too, seemed real to him, the best reading possible.

After she left, he moved slowly, almost wonderingly, around the set, as if all of it were new and remarkable in some way. As if he were a new Gabriel, looking freshly at everything—his hands, the empty glass, the books he touched. He stood staring blankly into the blinding light behind the window upstage, smiling slightly to be feeling it—what he felt.

When he heard his name spoken, he turned and had the shock of seeing Elizabeth, Elizabeth come back to him—hurt, but alive. It was like a blow: the news of his life, of his own fate, arriving. He could feel the tears starting. He wasn’t ready for them, he hadn’t known they would come. He covered his eyes for a few long moments.

Then he realized what he had to do. He dropped his hands to let her see his weeping face—this was, after all, his gift to her. He stepped forward, toward her, and in a voice barely above a whisper, said his last line. Her name. Elizabeth.