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would not have been surprised to learn that her fatal illness had been some sort of mind-body self-sabotage ploy to escape her husband, the only means at her disposal since, for some reason, she seemed to be sincerely devoted to the man.
    Lewis used to work at American Express, in a real high-level corporate management gig. He made piles of money, and Anna never had to work. He styled himself the benevolent upper-middle-class patriarch while scarring the women in his life with his constant needs for validation, collaboration, and approval. Lewis never left his wife and daughter alone, never gave them space to breathe. Stephen had seen it. Now Jay was alone, without the buffer of Anna to absorb Lewis’s poison.
    If only it had been Lewis who had died.
    And then, ten minutes later, Stephen was teaching his class. His mind moved on two tracks at once. He was talking about Kafka, and Musil, stuff he could do in his sleep and often did.
    But he was also thinking about Lewis, about having a talk with the old boy. Maybe Stephen could cajole a little sense into him. It wasn’t impossible. Stephen could be forceful.
    As forceful as Lewis? That remained to be determined.
    And now Stephen opened up his book and read aloud to his class.
    Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.
    “Someone tell me what that means,” Stephen said to his class with a tight smile.

5. HIS CONTINUED WILLINGNESS TO WEAR THE MASK OF LEWIS.
    L ewis took the bus downtown. He could have driven his Lexus, but it cost money to park it—he was already overextended on payments on the thing, bought a couple of years ago when he was living another life. His old job at American Express had come with a corner office and prepaid parking in a downtown ramp. His new job came with an employee discount.
    It was still impossible to believe that Anna had left the world before him. He’d gone through his decades of on-and-off smoking, his mood problems, the negativity that had cast a pall over his adult life—hadn’t that been enough to finish
him
off early? Wasn’t that supposed to be the
design
—that he would die before her, that he would never be left alone?
    He got off the bus at Seventh Ave. and winced as he was enveloped by the cloud of smoke the thing discharged pulling away from the curb. Despite himself, he still loved downtown in the morning. People were clenched up with the shock of being alive, and the low-angle sun poked from between the buildings like the eye of God. It was splendid.
    He was still doing all the clichéd widower things. He woke most mornings and, just for a moment, was considerate of her side of the bed until he remembered that the bed was now all his. When he woke on the sofa downstairs, he searched his memory for whatever transgression had landed him there. He sought out her brand of cereal on the supermarket shelf. He wondered when she was coming home. Everything in his environment promulgated a sense of disbelief.
    There, rising above the street, was the building where he used to work. Lewis imagined what was going on up there, on the twenty-second floor, where he once had an assistant and thirty-five people working under him. The company had offered him a leave of absence when Anna was close to death; it had been a chance to walk away and return when he was ready. But he never got ready, and after several months the offer was politely rescinded. Lewis’s old peers were incapable of understanding that the man who worked in the corner office no longer existed. He couldn’t understand the job anymore, the client services, the supervision, the meetings. Maybe he had never liked it. He certainly hadn’t been
happy
there. But now he sure as hell could have used the money.
    The sidewalk beneath his feet, as he stood there with people passing, was as solid as anything got. The thing he couldn’t grasp was the dissolution of Anna’s physical form—the fine