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to cast it into a river, let it be borne away … somewhere, into some ocean where it will be drowned, a victim of its own insignificance. He had hurt her, badly. She had not been destroyed. Her life was, by any measure, prosperous. And when he hurt her they were both young. Whatever they are now, they are no longer young.
    Seeing him before her, she thinks: Soon, who knows when, soon we will no longer be in this life. And it seems to her, suddenly, of the utmost folly to cherish a grievance against this man, this fellow creature, who has, like her, lost youth, and, unlike her, health. She is full of gratitude for this opportunity: something can be done with the past, it can’t be recaptured but it won’t fly forgotten as a dream, and the bitterness of it need not triumph. She sees the pallor of his skin. Can she ask him, Are you all right?
    Or: Are you healthy?
    What is the opposite of healthy?
    Unhealthy?
    Unwell?
    Ill?
    Sick?
    Afflicted?
    Close to death?
    She thinks of the phrase “rude health.” Odd, as if health were an offense, a carelessness, an insult.
    She has always had rude health.
    She has enjoyed good health.
    What is the nature of this enjoyment? How would you name this kind of joy?
    He knows that she’s seen something, and, misunderstanding the nature of her work, or assuming that because she’s married to a doctor there’s a body of knowledge she has picked up at the breakfast table, in the marriage bed, he assumes she’s making a diagnosis. That he is being judged.
    “My wind isn’t what it was.”
    “No, none of ours is.” This is a lie; she can actually run farther now than she could when they were together. She is never out of breath.
    He will not waste her time. “I have a stent in my heart.”
    Stent, she thinks, an ugly word. It always reminds her of a fetal pig. She won’t insult him, trivialize him, by saying something in response. She waits for him to speak again.
    “I had a heart attack eight years ago. I thought I was dying. It did seem like an attack: swift, sudden, a shocking pain. Then a kind of brightness. I became quite calm. I thought, So this is it, then. Later, thinking about it, I tried to understand what I meant by those words. ‘This.’ ‘It.’ ‘Then.’ ”
    “You weren’t frightened?”
    “I was sad. For so many years, I hadn’t liked my life. It was too difficult for me. But I’d been given a second chance. With Clare. With Lucy. And as I thought I might be dying, I thought about how dear life was. I thought of the category: dearness. How I would miss my life. Life. Not only those I loved, but at that moment I was thinking: I will miss trees. I became quite sad thinking that, if I died, I would no longer see trees. Death seemed to me bereftness, a landscape bereft of trees.”
    “The trees here are remarkable,” she says, knowing she shouldn’t want to change the subject or steer the sentence away from the part of it that spoke of death to the part of it that spoke of trees. But she can’t speak of death to him, not as they are now, knowing each other so little, strangers to each other. It seems unseemly, impolite. She has, she feels, no place to stand, as if a chair has been pulled out from under her as she was preparing to take her seat at table, as if she is standing on the quicksand from the movies that frightened her as a child. She is being cast down, sucked under, by the impossibility of a response.
    “What are they, I wonder, these trees. I believe they are called ilex. And there are the cypresses. And those wonderful Roman pines. Umbrella pines, aren’t they called?”
    “You always knew the names of trees,” he says. He doesn’t say to her, When I thought I was dying, when I thought about missing trees, I thought of you. That I would die without learning the names of trees . He says, “I always thought someday you’d teach me.”
    “I thought about it,” she says. “But when I tried, I saw that it made you feel overwhelmed, and I