A minute later I went back to the table, but I seemed to have lost my ability to speak. I smiled vaguely at everyone, but I couldn’t follow the conversation, and within a minute or two, everyone stood up to leave. I could hear a voice in my mind that said that we had company over, and that I was making a scene, and that I should just say something ordinary, but I couldn’t do it. After the guests were gone, Bernard came back to the dining room and sat beside me and, with that infinite gentleness of his, stroked my hair. Then he picked me up and carried me to our bedroom and put me down on the bed. “Come on,” he said softly, and he unfolded me and helped take off my clothes and put me under the covers. He lay down beside me and stroked my hair and held on to me until I did finally fall into that oddly peaceful slumber that comes when sleep can hold nothing more terrible than your waking dreams. I slept until noon; when I woke up I found a long note from Bernard, and a lovely breakfast standing in the dining room. I wanted to telephone him, but I was still unable to make a sound. In three days, it would be Bernard’s birthday, and we were to have a party. I had planned that beautiful party endlessly, to be a fitting tribute to his measureless patience. I had poured all my affection for Bernard into it; it was to be the public evidence of a love in some ways so private I feared Bernard himself might not always have known it was there. In the silence of that morning my happy plans blew apart. I ate the breakfast, and then I hailed a cab to Heathrow. I quietly boarded another plane, leaving the party, like an orphan child, to take care of itself.

V: Valse Brillante

V

VALSE BRILLANTE

The morning of my mother’s second surgery broke brilliantly clear. It was the kind of June day my mother had always loved, when the sun casts blithe shadows on the sidewalks and the air is bright and your skin feels blissfully soft. By the time of my mother’s second surgery, my father had become a benefactor of the hospital where she was being treated, and she had therefore been given a room unlike any other hospital room on earth, the size of a small recital hall, with windows on three sides looking out at the stately East River. There were, as usual, flowers. The room seemed too good for bad news. We arrived at dawn on the day of my mother’s second surgery, and gave her all our sunrise assurances, and half an hour later watched as they wheeled her away down the long corridor.