And the books I had written, clustered in a corner of the bookcase, now seemed inextricably linked to exile and sadness. Not my sadness, of course, but one that was coming for Hadley. Those books I had authored, peppered with people and places she knew, would become symbols of what she had lost⁠—though, in truth, they were exactly the opposite.

But grief is a frantic, inconsolable child.

After toast, I boiled water. Then switched on the television, but not for long. The voices, the untenable certainty of prerecording, made me suddenly afraid.

I brewed tea and squeezed in honey from a plastic bear.

I sifted mail.

There was nothing else to do that didn’t lead me off a thought-cliff.

So I had a bath and tried to read a book about what animals feel. But it was hard to concentrate because while sitting in the warm water, I realized I was impersonating myself, pretending to be the man I had been before I found out.

Yet I was that same man, naked in the bath, with the same head, same hands, same ridiculous penis. Nothing had truly changed; I always knew I would die. It’s just that the date had been moved up. That sort of reasoning doesn’t work at all, by the way. As though death is something written on the calendar, to be crossed out and rescheduled like a dental cleaning.

After my bath, I lay naked on the bed. I think I may have tried to get an erection, I’m not sure. Though to comfort myself I almost certainly held it. I remember touching the hair, fingering the strands and imagining myself as a Neanderthal. Perhaps this experience would have been easier in those times, just to feel tired one day, then after a few, painful weeks in the most windless part of the cave, closer to the fire than ever before, with the choicest meat, to be immortalized in a ceremony of flame and shadow.

Anyway, that was part of the first day.

16.

In the afternoon, I left town for country.

My wife has always been overly perceptive. In order to hide the panic that was surely coming, I needed to get out of the apartment and scribbled a lie to say I was driving to our cottage in Amagansett after feeling inspired for a new story.

When Hadley texted me that night, I was seventy miles east of the city, at the old farm table in the kitchen with the lights off and my coat still on. The drive east had been uneventful. Just some minor flooding on Montauk Highway, as though my unshed tears were pooling elsewhere.

My wife texted to ask if I was coming back later in the week so she could arrange dinner for us at Sant Ambroeus with friends we hadn’t seen in a while.