Instead—my duty seemed to fortify my long morning of earnest homely errands into something frothy, a comic meringue worthy of Noel Coward or Cole Porter. I recalled Robert telling me way back that the two of us exerted more charm while flossing our teeth than some poor suckers put forth during their whole honeymoons, and I remember wondering what charm was exactly?

Some willingness to exaggerate? To live in continual innocent relation to the world’s outsized joys and shocks? I had actually looked up the word. Or had I meant to and was I, in my exhaustion, just recalling what I’d expected its meaning to be?

No, wait. Not only had I got to the dictionary, I’d photocopied the definition, had a slide made of it. I’d scattered it among the sundry other images: the head of Brahms, the jewel-like nudity of Madame Bonnard’s floating iridescent in her bath. I recalled more now—in the jumbled fatigued way that only let me move cerebrally in such short staccato lurches like those follow-the-dot games I once loved in my boyhood Jack and Jill magazines.

As usual, I entered Robert’s room talking. I had peeled off my coat, had plucked a dead lilac from Angie’s otherwise still-lovely arrangement, I tugged down one corner of his bedclothes, then slowly registered new retinal evidence, changes in a room that had begun to seem eternal in its sameness.

The projector had jammed between two slides. These images (held there all night?) had burned. One depicted the upper half of Schubert’s face, his tiny glasses seared clear through to whiteness but the wavy hair and the whole scorched forehead remained, a brown zigzag husk. Atop this, superimposed as in some Alabama image, black spiney letter, projected, big.

Charm, a noun. —based on Middle English for a magic spell, derived from the Latin word “carmen” meaning incantation. 1. The power or quality of pleasing or delighting; attractiveness: “The breezy tropical setting had great charm”. 2. A particular quality that attracts; a delightful characteristic: “A mischievous grin was among the child’s many charms”. 3. A small ornament, such as one worn on a bracelet. 4. An item worn for its supposed magical benefit, as in warding off evil; an amulet. 5. To attract or delight greatly. To bewitch.

Light in here bounced images off the wall and back down onto our patient. He, unsupervised, lay naked atop his sheets. He’d noticed me; I’d never felt so watched by him. When flourishing, he had never liked direct stares; but the more silent he grew, the more legalistic, dubious Talmudic, and resigned these long looks grew.