She rented a nice apartment. A little dark. A little shabby. The window looked out on a stunted palm. Listen: it had a sundeck. Papa could sunbathe with people his own age. Except people his own age were not a source of wonder to Papa.

The old man submitted. She moved the color TV into his tiny living room and packed up his True Detective magazines. Twice a week she ran up to visit him, between appointments. I got reports on how much better off Papa was watching television and sunbathing in a deckchair with people his own age.

Then Papa got sick.

This, really, is the point of the story. Not so much his death. He was an old man. Papa got sick and she had to call a doctor. That’s the point of the story. Our doctor. Who had this suite of offices and booked you into the Cedars of Lebanon for a skin rash. Papa got sick and she got scared and she had to call our doctor.

Well. One couldn’t have our doctor see Papa in so undistinguished a setting. It had a sundeck, all right, and a color TV, but you couldn’t honestly say it wasn’t a little dark and a little shabby. My second wife hastened to redecorate Papa’s apartment. She bought new drapes. She had the carpets hastily cleaned. She put gay slipcovers on the slightly battered chairs. Papa got a haircut. With a hundred and four temperature, Papa got a haircut. The barber had a funny look. Then our doctor, he had a taste for foreign cars, drove up and attended the refurbished sick man. Papa never got well. I was there. He didn’t cluck. He didn’t shake an amazed head. He turned to the wall, where he couldn’t see his clever daughter and her clever world, and he died.

I thought of the story of the death of my second wife’s father as I sat in a restaurant having dinner with Aurora. A worm of discontent had certainly eaten at the heart of my second wife. But as I looked across the table it seemed to me that nothing ate at the soft and female center of this girl.

Taking her to a restaurant was in itself a pleasure. I would watch in fascination as a pair of thick French lambchops were stripped of their meat, as the potatoes vanished, as the salad went, as the dessert disappeared. I thought of her gastric juices admiringly. Her teeth celebrated themselves as teeth. My god; how nice it was not to see a woman pick at a plate. And when she had eaten, she would settle back against the wall of the booth, and smile at me, as though now the lambchops or the rare steak or the lobster fra diavolo were gone she were allowing me to come back into the frame of her attention.

Oh, it wasn’t that she was gluttonous. Everything was just delicious. And she was it: I mean, the whole mechanics of eating. She didn’t devour things. I watched closely. The steak wasn’t gobbled up. Eaten was the only way to describe it. She was a creature who was there to eat. It was why there were restaurants at all. Why the chef bothered. Why the spits turned.