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Elena made room—by wanting to listen and understand, by already partway understanding before I even started to talk. And so I gave her Jess: her laughter, her restless curiosity, the combination of strength and vulnerability, passion and compassion, that made even the most reticent people want to tell her their stories and trust her to write about them. Her crazy Mormon upbringing, her three macho brothers who never liked me and her devout widowed mother who, to everyone’s surprise except Jess’s, did. The look on her face when I asked her to marry me, when she saw Iz in his cage at the ASPCA, when she landed her first New Yorker piece, when they called my name at the Emmys. Of course I didn’t share everything—there are parts of Jess that are nobody’s but mine—but I gave Elena a lot of the really good stuff and finally, when she nudged me—“And in addition to being an angel, was she also a saint?”—some of the bad.
    Jess could be impatient and moody. She tended to fret over little things: an unreturned phone call, an overcooked roast. She’d voted for Bush twice (though not, in her defense, for McCain). And the worst thing, the thing I’d never told anyone, was that buried beneath that magnificent humor of hers was a ferocious, scorched-earth temper that emerged every six months or so and turned her into an alarming stranger. The last time being the day she died.
    Oh, did I forget to mention that?
    It wasn’t me she was mad at that day; at least, not initially. She’d been working for months on a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly about political wives, and they’d decided to cut it in half. Jess was in high dudgeon: the editors were cowards, Philistines, sexist porkers. I made the mistake of pointing out that the managing editor, who’d presumably been part of the decision to cut the piece, was a woman, and that’s when Jesszilla came roaring out. Usually I just let her rant until she’d spent her fury, but that day I was fed up with the drama, and when she tore into me I tore back. We said terrible things to each other, things the sight of her on that sidewalk twenty minutes later wiped almost completely from my memory—a small mercy. Jess was always the one who stormed out at some point in the argument, and that day was no different. Except that day she took Izzy with her. And died.
    FADE IN:
    INT. KITCHEN - DAY
    MICHAEL LARSSEN, 34, is standing in a well-appointed open kitchen, furiously chopping carrots, WHACK WHACK WHACK. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” over an arrow pointing down. Every few seconds he looks up and glares at the front door, like he might cheerfully decapitate the next person who walks in. He’s so distracted he cuts his finger with the knife.
    MICHAEL
    Son of a BITCH!
    The rest of the scene went pretty much the same as previously scripted, except when I described it to Elena I found myself dredging up details I didn’t even know I remembered: How the jacket covering Jess had had a Knicks logo on it, which she would have hated, diehard Lakers fan that she was. How one of her shoelaces was loose, and how I’d had the irrational urge to bend down and tie it. How, when the paramedics were loading her body into the ambulance that would not be racing to the hospital with sirens wailing and red and blue lights flashing, the sky cleared suddenly and the sun broke through, and I looked up at it and shouted, “Fuck you!”
    When I finished, Elena was quiet for a long while. From the wistful look on her face I guessed she was thinking about her father: the last time she’d seen him, the things she’d said to him and hadn’t, wished she’d said and wished she hadn’t. My hand reached out and squeezed hers.
    INT. HOTEL LOBBY - NIGHT
    Michael and ELENA, 29, are standing at guest reception in an elegant hotel, with IZZY, a springer spaniel,