It is Pierre who tells us one evening the truth about Madam Bessant’s husband. The story has reached him through a private and intricately convoluted family pipeline: the ex-husband of a cousin of Pierre’s sister-in-law (or something of this order) once lived in the same apartment block as Monsieur and Madam Bessant, on the same floor in fact, and remembered that the nights were often disturbed by the noise of crying babies and the sound of Monsieur Bessant, who was a piano teacher, playing Chopin, often the same nocturne again and again, always the same. When the piano playing stopped abruptly one day, the neighbors assumed that someone had complained. There was also a rumor, because he was no longer seen coming or going, that Monsieur Bessant was sick. This rumor was verified one morning, suddenly and terribly, by the news of his death. He had, it seemed, collapsed in a downtown Métro station on a steamy summer day, just toppled off the platform into the path of an approaching train. And one more detail. Pierre swallows as he says it. The head was completely separated from the body.

What are we to do with this story? We sit for some time in silence. It is a story too filled with lesions and hearsay, yet it is also, coming from the artless, stammering Pierre, curiously intact. All its elements fit; its sequence is wholly convincing-Monsieur Bessant, swaying dizzily one minute and cut to ribbons the next, people screaming, the body collected and identified, the family informed, heat rising in waves and deforming the future. Everything altered, changed forever.

“Of course it might have been a heart attack,” Pierre says, wanting now to cancel the whole account and go back to the other, simpler story of an unfeeling husband who abandons his wife for a younger woman.

“Or a stroke,” Cecile Landreau suggests. “A stroke is not all that unusual, even for a quite young man. I could tell you stories.”

Robert Mooney keeps his eyes on the chilly neck of his beer bottle. And he keeps his mouth clapped shut. All the while the rest of us offer theories for Monsieur Bessant’s sudden collapse-heat stroke, low blood sugar-Robert keeps a hard silence. “A helluva shock” is all he says, and then mumbles, “for her.”