Back when he was happily married to his wife, Lydia, the doctor was unloading the trunk of the car, which was parked under the low-hanging branches of the only maple in the yard, when he felt something brush his head. He was startled. Intuition told him to recoil. The hornet nest was a large one, built around a low branch—one of those swirling gyres, layers of delicate paper (like a croissant) flaking around an inner comb. The hornets emerged from a rictus at the center, and he was lucky, deeply lucky, he told Lydia, in the kitchen, holding her in his arms, that he wasn’t stung.—I mean I just stood up from the trunk and here it was, the nest, for God’s sake, right against my head. They went outside together and examined it and felt the chilly mystery of the industrious way the nest surrounded the leaves and the branch. Later, in the evening, he went out when things were quiet—when all the hornets had returned home—and sprayed insecticide into the nest. In the morning he knocked it down with a stick. The dead hornets peppered the white stones of the driveway. In pieces the nest looked small, feeble, caved in like a dead animal. A few of the larvae twisted slightly inside the comb. He sprayed them, too, just to be civil about it.

Again he stands at his daughter’s window observing the wasp nest, up in the corner, between the storm window and the casement, built there in the spring, when the house was shut tight and the queen found the space where the window refused to meet the groove—a flaw perhaps in the production of the frames—and, having built her single small central structure, in which her workers hatched, was now the proud owner of a large nest of tight-waisted yellow wasps. He’s standing at the window reminiscing about a patient named Bartres, a pianist from Argentina who once reached across his desk during a preoperative conference and said:—You have wonderful hands, beautiful fingers—octave fingers—and I will entrust my entire career to all ten of them. Bartres was a prodigy who, on approaching his first keyboard at five, had pecked out the Beethoven “Pathetique” Sonata by ear. The pianist saw his own abilities as deeply mysterious, a gift handed over by fate and therefore subject to fate’s whims. He was a nervous wreck who had to be nursed along carefully, given extensive explanations of the nature of rheumatoid subluxations of the joints and shown each step of the procedure, the cracking open of the bone and the insertion of the joints (at which point the doctor handed over one of the small, round, glossy pebbles of Dycron that was to replace the natural joint and watched as Bartres rolled it between his thumb and index finger). The procedure failed. There was a bad heal-up. A few weeks later the patient was seated sullenly in the chair across from his desk with his bandaged hands heavy in his lap, eyes wet and empty as he mumbled a prayer. Gently he told the pianist, just as he had told other patients, that a bad heal-up was a gross error in the judgment of God. It was a highly unprofessional statement. But it made sense to put a spiritual spin on the fact that some joints never mend, and that, in some patients, the Dycron pebbles sit uselessly amid the wet, glossy tissues.