![]() Lionel Friedman, who died last year, wasn’t old-sixty-four. Heddi Conyer, Luce’s closest friend in the Hazelton Chamber Orchestra, recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, is only fifty-six. ![]() Todd Jameson, Andrew’s tennis partner, stricken last year with a mysterious autoimmune disorder that mimicked certain of the symptoms of lupus but was (evidently) not lupus, is just sixty-a youthful sixty. And Andrew’s lawyer friend from Yale, Roy Whalen, a former Olympic swimmer and a longtime resident of Hazelton-on-Hudson, afflicted with worsening stenosis of the spine, is only fifty-seven. Edith Danvers, for instance, Luce’s colleague at Bard College, one of their few remaining neighbors on Vedders Hill Way, recently diagnosed with Stage III colorectal cancer, is only fifty-one-Luce’s age exactly. Luce resents this attempt at humor from her husband, at such a precarious time. She hasn’t touched the instrument in weeks but is desperate suddenly to cup it to her chin, wield the bow-and snatch from oblivion a few minutes of a Bach partita she first memorized as a music student at Columbia, nothing more exquisite, more soothing to the soul. Her violin! Luce runs into the bedroom to fetch it, quickly, before Andrew returns. Ugly yellow construction vehicles are parked haphazardly at the edge of the narrow road, a goddam eyesore.Ī fleet of jets from the military base passes overhead with earsplitting noise, tearing a seam in the sky. Luce has scanned the scene with her binoculars and has discovered nothing to alarm her unduly, except that the repair work on the upper stretch of Vedders Hill Way, which was recently washed away in a mudslide, seems to have temporarily stopped. ![]() And the rank smell of the soil around the house has returned, is, in fact, stronger this spring. Today, Luce is not wearing the mask, though the wind from the south does indeed smell funny, wrong. (Is that even a word-“catastrophizing”? Luce understands that Andrew means to affect a comical tone, a sort of cartoon rhetoric, to soften the mockery and the annoyance he so clearly feels yet “catastrophizing” also acknowledges the very real, the surely imminent catastrophe.)
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