I think I called Bernard that night when I got back to the hotel. He was his usual sensible self, and advised me not to worry. Like my father, Bernard was always sure things would be fine. Helen, though she dutifully said that these upsets were routine, clearly feared the worst. She and I lay in our separate beds in our large beautiful room; I hardly slept at all, and she seemed to toss and turn all night.

• • •

Sunday is as vivid in my mind as Saturday is confused. I can remember waking up to the fact of my mother’s illness, and a strained room-service breakfast with Helen. That day my mother wore a shell-pink suit and a white blouse with a thousand little flowers on it in shades of pale pink. The blouse looked like a Monet painting. She wore shoes with small buckles. We had a driver, one of those handsome young Ritz drivers, who told us that he was really working in video production (though he gave every appearance of really working as a driver for the hotel), and we drew him out at some length on the subject of French video. We were going to lunch at another lovely restaurant, another landmark of my mother’s Paris. It was a beautiful day, a day of perfect Paris weather, the air warm, the breeze light, the sun clear. We were meeting a Parisian friend of mine for lunch. My mother was in a mood that being with my friends often brought out in her, a philosophic mood of trenchant generalities.

“It’s so hard to understand at your age,” she said to my friend, apropos of nothing in particular. “When you’re in your twenties, so many things seem exciting, or seem like fun, and then when you try to hold on to them they fall apart. There are so few structures that really last.”

This was the first in a series of remarks to other people that were abstractly stirring in principle but that were, in fact, intended to communicate to me my mother’s discontent with my life with Bernard and her belief that I was destroying all my chances of future happiness. Her inkling that a disaster of her own was impending seemed to make her more urgent in this communication than she had been previously; I wished that the portents had distracted her from Bernard instead of making her focus on him. I wanted to feel only affection for her in our moment of crisis, and she was making it extremely difficult. She and Freddy had somehow become closer as a result of his breakup with Melanie, and I felt that she and I were drifting further and further apart. My response to her conversation at lunch that day was a mix of fondness for the particular mode employed, a mode I associated with my mother at her wisest and most beguiling, and irritation (I was not keyed-up enough for rage) at her inability to accept that all happiness for all people does not spring from a single maze of roots.