“Two million five,” I said.

“Can you hang on a second, Joe? I have to go outside and fire Zoe.” A moment of silence followed, while he put the phone down and did whatever a man like Hal does when he’s about to drop a lot of money on what, he knew, was a sentimental whim, and not even his own.

“Okay, my friend. Two point five it is. And if you ever tell anyone what a pushover I am, I will have you vaporized. Believe me. I know people who know people. Are we done?”

“Mostly. Draw up the revised agreement but date it for September, after we close down for the season. I’ll sell him the camp, but I won’t be his employee. It’s nothing personal, I’ve just never worked for anyone and I don’t want to start now.”

I heard Hal sigh. “Of course it’s personal, Joe. It’s all personal. And September is too late, for reasons that are so obvious I’ll assume you’re bluffing. How’s this: Mid-July, but we’ll work something into the paperwork that leaves you in charge for the time being. Management to transfer to his estate at the time of his death, something like that. Sally can figure out the details. Will that satisfy you?”

I understood that it would have to. “All right. That’s good of you.”

For a moment neither of us spoke.

“Joe, it’s not everybody who gets to grant a dying man’s last wish. I don’t want to get too deep here, but that’s what you’re doing, and it matters. To all of us. I really mean that.”

“I know you do.” The receiver was heavy in my hand, and I realized if I stayed on the phone another second, I would probably change my mind. “Just send the plane, will you, Hal? I want to go home.”

THREE

When I was diagnosed with what I have come to call “the cancer,” and I told my new wife, Frances, that I would surely die of it, she said something that would surprise anyone but me. She told me the doctors were wrong.

“You’re not going to die of cancer, Harry,” she said, and took me tenderly by the hand, “because, my sweet darling, I’m going to fuck you to death.”

It is true that men of my age (seventy going on Methuselah), marital status (widowed since the Nixon years), and general station in life (rich as greedy Midas) have a number of options before them, and need not spend a single lonely hour if loneliness does not suit them. There are more than enough perfume-counter clerks, Croatian hand models, and former-ski-instructors-turned-massage-therapists to go around, and I have seen more than a few fellow travelers take this happy road.

But my Frances is no trophy wife. She is, to begin with, fifty-two years old: young for me, but not by the standards of the role. Nor is she what might be called attractive, or even, euphemistically, “handsome”; my Frances is a muscular girl, solid and big-boned with a wide face and strong jaw best suited for public oratory or, perhaps, the boxing ring. Her hair, which she does not dye, is gray as dishwater; her hands and feet are large. She is, in sum, constructed more or less as a suburban office building is constructed, low-slung and unobtrusive, built to take the wind and rain and sun and encourage useful work, her whole physical person communicating nothing more or less than a state of pure Midwestern practicality. Think: Kansas City. Think: Detroit. Think: Cleveland (where she’s from). If God were a real estate developer from Ohio, Eve would have looked exactly like my Frances.

And yet beneath this cunning camouflage of plainness lurks an altogether different sort of woman, a sensual companion of such responsiveness and enthusiam that she can be likened only to the most celebrated generosities of nature. She says the things she likes to say, grinds her hips into mine with joyful abandon, understands the virtue of interesting underclothes and has never disappointed me in this department; once, during my first stay at the hospital, she arrived at my bedside wearing nothing but a trench coat, a merry-widow, and a pair of shoes I won’t describe but will leave to your imagination, as they reside in mine. In the darkness of our room or even the sour, desexualized precincts of the hospital, she moves her sturdy body back and forth above me in a sweetly undulating motion that recalls the great parabolas-the moon and tides and all the ships at sea-and when at last she achieves her final transport, she calls out my name and buries her face and breath in my withered old neck, taking me with her.

I’m no fool. It can’t be such a lark to fuck an old man, especially a dying old man. She’s had three husbands before me, including, I kid you not, a professional deep-sea diver and the man who invented industrial bubble wrap, and who could blame her if, behind her closed eyes, she is actually reliving some carnal adventure from her past? Nor is it fair to say that we love each other, precisely. Of all the concessions one must make to age, I have discovered this is actually the easiest to face, because its theme is not scarcity but abundance: we have simply loved too many others-spouses, lovers, children, dogs, and all the golden days and hours in our lives-to add one more to the pile. Love there is between us, but it’s an impersonal sort of love, more like a recollection of love than the thing itself, and what we have to offer one another is the chance to sip together from the cup of memory.

And where do my own thoughts go? To what precinct of remembered love does my mind take me?

Before my Frances there was my Meredith: the mother of my sons, one living, one not. I loved her enough to help her die, when her affliction, far crueler than my own, had stolen all but breath and speech from her body. This I have come to understand as lovemaking of another kind, a final journey one takes together, as much a part of the weave of human life as the feel of damp linens and paling light on an afternoon when you have conceived a child. And though this is the one thing I know that maybe not everyone else does, I have never told the story.

It begins with a cigarette. A Lucky Strike, filterless, the kind that could burn all the way down to the end. What everyone smoked in those hard-smoking days-as harmless, we thought, as a piece of candy. Though it was not the cigarette that caused anything.

Summer, 1951: We had been out for the evening with friends; Sam was six months old, Hal was not yet born. We were living in Philadelphia, a pair of newlyweds in our first house, an attached brick rowhome on a street of identical brick rowhomes where all day long women and children flowed in and out of one another’s houses in a constant, unyielding river: toys and bikes and strollers all over the sidewalks, always in the background the abundant sounds of family life, everyone young and getting started at last. I was working then for wages, a junior supervisor in a factory that made electric switch-gears. It didn’t matter what it was: aspirin, hubcaps, tomato soup. It could have been anything. I was little more than a clerk, though at the time I felt lucky, even important. We had no money at all; I had never been so happy.

We returned late that night to the house, nearly midnight; the babysitter, an older woman from around the corner whose husband was a greenskeeper at the town-owned golf course, was fast asleep on the sofa, the radio softly playing on the table beside her. A night out, even at the home of friends, was a splurge for us. I awoke her gently and paid her and walked her to the door.

When I returned to the kitchen I found Meredith smoking at the table.

“Sam all right?”

“Sound asleep.” She put her fist to her mouth to yawn and shook her head. “The room was a little warm. I opened a window.”

“We should go to bed, you know. He’ll be up later.”

“I know.” She nodded sleepily. “It’s just nice to sit awhile when everything’s quiet.”