“Sure, in clinical. That’s why I’m going to end up testing sweet little boys to see why they won’t come out from under the bed.”

He nodded, smiling.

“What’s it like to watch somebody die?”

“I remember, the first time . . . I was a student. There was this man . . . Well, I saw him on my rounds. He was simply fine, laughing and joking. While I was fixing his I.V. his heart stopped. We tried everything in the book to bring him back. I remember looking at him and asking myself, ‘Where did it go? What was it that went away? What turned him from a person into . . . this?”

“God,” she said. Then, “I’ve got this lump.”

“What?” he said.

She shook her head.

But he had heard. “Where?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “I’m a doctor, remember?” Probably the breast, he thought.

She looked away. “Please. I’m sorry I mentioned it, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m the kind who worries.”

“Then why don’t you make an appointment with a doctor for an examination?”

“I will.”

“Promise me?”

She nodded, smiled at him, changed the subject: told him about herself. Parents divorced; father remarried and running a resort in the Berkshires, mother remarried to a cattleman in Idaho. He told her his mother had been Italian and was dead and that his father was Jewish, but he carefully avoided saying anything else about him, aware that she noticed and did not press.

When they finished three cups of coffee apiece she insisted on driving him back to the hospital. He didn’t kiss her goodnight, partially because the hospital entrance was not at all private and partially because he was too damned tired to think about being Zorba or Ulysses or anybody but a sleeping form in the bed in the room on the top floor.

Nevertheless, he stopped the elevator on the second floor and walked as if magnet-drawn to Room 218. One quick check, he promised himself, and he would go to bed.

Helen Fultz was leaning stiffly over Joseph Grigio.

“What are you doing?”

“The eleven to seven nurse never showed up.”

“Well, I’m here.” His guilt manifested itself in annoyance. “Go to bed, please.” How old was she, he wondered. She looked done in, her gray hair wisping down over the lined, tight-lipped face.

“I’m not going anywhere. It’s too long since I did a little old-fashioned nursing. Paperwork turns you into a clerk.” Her tone brooked no argument, but he argued. In the end they compromised. It was past midnight. He said she could stay until one o’clock.

The presence of a second person, he found, made a great deal of difference. She maintained her neurotic silence but she brewed coffee hotter than Gaby’s flesh, blacker than Robinson’s. They spelled each other in applying the dressings when their hands protested the repeated immersions in iced saline.

Joseph Grigio kept on breathing. This old terror, this silent gray bitch, this tired aging woman had kept him alive. Now with the help of a surgeon he might yet recover and prove an ass. Shakespeare.