“Well,” said my agent, delighted and ironic. “I see we’re finally getting someplace. Where the hell did that come from?”

“I’ve been practicing,” I said helplessly.

“You keep practicing,” he said to me.

• • •

It was on a clear day in May, when I was having dinner with Bernard and some friends in his dining room—Bernard had made the first of the season’s lamb—that Freddy called. My father had not been able to bring himself to do it. It was Freddy who said that there had been aberrant test results, and that they would be doing surgery on my mother in five days, to make sure that she really was OK. “It’s all very unclear,” said Freddy. “They seem to think she’ll be fine, but they’re a little vague. I guess we just can’t tell what’s going on until they get inside her and look.” His voice had that same upbeat tone that we had all used to protect my mother in the first months of her illness. I did not need to challenge him on it. I hung up the telephone, and ran down the hallway, past the dining room and all the people in it, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I lay on the floor and curled myself into a tight bundle and clutched my knees under my chin and closed my eyes and tried to remember the complacence in which I had been living for the better part of that long winter. After some time, Bernard came and knocked on the bathroom door and asked whether I was all right, but I was unable to answer him. I stayed curled on the ugly yellowed carpeting of his bathroom and made no sounds at all, because if I had opened my mouth a wail would have poured out of me that would not have stopped.

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.