He stands to help Richard with the dishes, but when Richard tells him to go upstairs, he is relieved, because he’s exhausted; this is the most socializing he has done since Thanksgiving. At the door, Richard hands him something, a package wrapped in brown paper, and then hugs him. “He wouldn’t want you to be unhappy, Judy,” he says, and he nods against Richard’s cheek. “He would hate seeing you like this.”

“I know,” he says.

“And do me a favor,” Richard says, still holding him. “Call JB, okay? I know it’s difficult for you, but—he loved Willem too, you know. Not like you, I know, but still. And Malcolm. He misses him.”

“I know,” he repeats, tears coming to his eyes once more. “I know.”

“Come back next Sunday,” Richard says, and kisses him. “Or any day, really. I miss seeing you.”

“I will,” he says. “Richard—thank you.”

“Happy birthday, Jude.”

He takes the elevator upstairs. It’s suddenly grown late. Back in his apartment, he goes to his study, sits on the sofa. There is a box that he hasn’t opened that was messengered over to him from Flora weeks ago; inside it are Malcolm’s bequests to him, and to Willem—which are now also his. The only thing Willem’s death has helped with is blunting the shock, the horror of Malcolm’s, and still, he has been unable to open the box.

But now he will. First, though, he unwraps Richard’s present and sees that it is a small bust, carved from wood and mounted on a heavy black-iron cube, of Willem, and he gasps as if slugged. Richard has always claimed that he’s terrible with figurative sculpture, but he knows he’s not, and this piece is proof of it. He glides his fingers over Willem’s sightless eyes, across Willem’s crest of hair, and after doing so, lifts them to his nose and smells sandalwood. On the bottom of the base is etched “To J on his 51st. With love. R.”

He starts to cry again; stops. He places the bust on the cushion next to him and opens the box. At first he sees nothing but wads of newspaper, and he gropes carefully inside until his hands close on something solid, which he lifts out: it is the scale model of Lantern House, its walls rendered from boxwood, that had once sat in Bellcast’s offices, alongside the scale models of every other project the firm had ever built, in form or in reality. The model is about two feet square, and he settles it on his lap before holding it to his face, looking through its thin Plexiglas windows, hoisting the roof up and walking his fingers through its rooms.

He wipes his eyes and reaches into the box again. The next thing he retrieves is an envelope fat with pictures of them, the four of them, or just of him and Willem: from college, from New York, from Truro, from Cambridge, from Garrison, from India, from France, from Iceland, from Ethiopia—places they’d lived, trips they’d taken.

The box isn’t very large, and still he removes things: two delicate, rare books of drawings of Japanese houses by a French illustrator; a small abstract painting by a young British artist he’d always admired; a larger drawing of a man’s face by a well-known American painter that Willem had always liked; two of Malcolm’s earliest sketchbooks, filled with page after page of his imaginary structures. And finally, he lifts the last thing from the box, something wrapped in layers of newspaper, which he removes, slowly.

Here, in his hands, is Lispenard Street: their apartment, with its odd proportions and slapdash second bedroom; its narrow hallways and miniature kitchen. He can tell that this is an early piece of Malcolm’s because the windows are made of glassine, not vellum or Plexiglas, and the walls are made of cardboard, not wood. And in this apartment Malcolm has placed furniture, cut and folded from stiff paper: his lumpy twin futon bed on its cinder-block base; the broken-springed couch they had found on the street; the squeaking wheeled easy chair given them by JB’s aunts. All that is missing is a paper him, a paper Willem.

He puts Lispenard Street on the floor by his feet. For a long time he sits very still, his eyes closed, allowing his mind to reach back and wander: there is much he doesn’t romanticize about those years, not now, but at the time, when he hadn’t known what to hope for, he hadn’t known that life could be better than Lispenard Street.

“What if we’d never left?” Willem would occasionally ask him. “What if I had never made it? What if you’d stayed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office? What if I was still working at Ortolan? What would our lives be like now?”

“How theoretical do you want to get here, Willem?” he’d ask him, smiling. “Would we be together?”

“Of course we’d be together,” Willem would say. “That part would be the same.”

“Well,” he’d say, “then the first thing we’d do is tear down that wall and reclaim the living room. And the second thing we’d do is get a decent bed.”

Willem would laugh. “And we’d sue the landlord to get a working elevator, once and for all.”

“Right, that’d be the next step.”

He sits, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. Then he turns on his phone, checks his missed calls: Andy, JB, Richard, Harold and Julia, Black Henry Young, Rhodes, Citizen, Andy again, Richard again, Lucien, Asian Henry Young, Phaedra, Elijah, Harold again, Julia again, Harold, Richard, JB, JB, JB.

He calls JB. It’s late, but JB stays up late. “Hi,” he says, when JB picks up, hears the surprise in his voice. “It’s me. Is this a good time to talk?”

2

AT LEAST ONE Saturday a month now he takes half a day off from work and goes to the Upper East Side. When he leaves Greene Street, the neighborhood’s boutiques and stores haven’t yet opened for the day; when he returns, they are closed for the night. On these days, he can imagine the SoHo Harold knew as a child: a place shuttered and unpeopled, a place without life.

His first stop is the building on Park and Seventy-eighth, where he takes the elevator to the sixth floor. The maid lets him into the apartment and he follows her to the back study, which is sunny and large, and where Lucien is waiting—not waiting for him, necessarily, but waiting.

There is always a late breakfast laid out for him: thin wedges of smoked salmon and tiny buckwheat pancakes one time; a cake glazed white with lemon icing the next. He can never bring himself to eat anything, although sometimes when he is feeling especially helpless he accepts a slice of cake from the maid and holds the plate in his lap for the entire visit. But although he doesn’t eat anything, he does drink cup after cup of tea, which is always steeped exactly how he likes it. Lucien eats nothing either—he has been fed earlier—nor does he drink.

Now he goes to Lucien and takes his hand. “Hi, Lucien,” he tells him.

He had been in London when Lucien’s wife, Meredith, called him: it was the week of Bergesson’s retrospective at MoMA, and he had arranged to be out of the city on business. Lucien had had a massive stroke, Meredith said; he would live, but the doctors didn’t yet know how great the damage would be.

Lucien was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was released, it was clear that his impairment was severe. And although it is not yet five months later, it has remained so: the features on the left side of his face seem to be melting off of him, and he cannot use his left arm or leg, either. He can still speak, remarkably well, but his memory has vanished, the past twenty years deserting him completely. In early July, he fell and hit his head and was in a coma; now, he is too unsteady to even walk, and Meredith has moved them back from their house in Connecticut to their apartment in the city, where they can be closer to the hospital and their daughters.

He thinks Lucien likes, or at least doesn’t mind, his visits, but he doesn’t know this for sure. Certainly Lucien doesn’t know who he is: he is someone who appears in his life and then disappears, and every time he must reintroduce himself.