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Chapters (24)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY SIGRID NUNEZ
  3. PART ONE
  4. Chapter I
  5. II
  6. III
  7. IV
  8. V
  9. VI
  10. VII
  11. VIII
  12. PART TWO
  13. Chapter I
  14. II
  15. III
  16. IV
  17. V
  18. PART THREE
  19. Chapter I
  20. II
  21. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  22. CREDITS
  23. About the Author
  24. What’s next onyour reading list?

Imagine my surprise (he wrote) to see you in the audience last night. Have you moved? I had no idea. I suppose if you’d wanted to talk to me you’d have looked for me afterward. I suppose if you’d wanted to be seen you wouldn’t have sat way in the back. Anyway, I did want you to know that I saw you and to thank you for coming. I thought of trying to reach you after dinner, but it went on quite late. I thought maybe if you were willing to get up very early we could have breakfast at my hotel before I had to leave. Then it occurred to me that the very idea of having breakfast with me might fill you with horror. Well, too late now. I’m at the airport. Again, thanks for coming. It made a difference to me, up there, knowing that you were listening. I hope all’s well with you and that you won’t mind my sending this message. I worry that it might give you pain, and yet it seemed the right thing to do. But, needless to say, please don’t feel that you have to reply.

—

What gave me pain was seeing him so much older. Not that he’d ever been handsome, but still. The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.

—

She was just thinking, she said.

Flaubert said, To think is to suffer.

Is this the same as Aristotle’s To perceive is to suffer?

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Alfred Hitchcock.

Sufferin’ succotash. Sylvester the cat.

II

The cancer treatments my friend had been receiving—and which included one course that was still experimental—succeeded beyond what cautious doctors had allowed her to hope.

She was going to live.

Or rather, as she put it, she was not going to die.

Actually, what she said was I don’t have to leave the party just yet.

Now she was swinging between euphoria and depression. Euphoria for the obvious reason; depression because, well, she wasn’t exactly sure why, but she’d been warned to expect it.

It sounds absurd, she said. But after thinking all this time that this was the end, and trying to prepare myself for it, survival feels anticlimactic.