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threatened or walking out of the room if one of ours fouled or fumbled. H. reached for the sports section first thing in the morning. It was a lifelong habit. “Why would you read the sports section before the first page?” I asked. I never got an answer.
    This time I go to watch the game without him.
    Wives sometimes go into another room and talk or play Scrabble while the game goes on. Some wives leave after an hour. A few watch. I watch. I like the male talk about point spreads and injuries and weights and coaches’ failures, and the quick reports of what has happened on the field before it is explained to the television audience. I listen when one or another of them gives the reason for

    the red handkerchief tossed on the ground before the referee calls out to the stands. Sometimes the referee wearing his prison-stripe uniform yells, “Unnecessary roughness.” As if the entire game weren’t unnecessary roughness. I like the male jostling in the room: which baseball player hit the most home runs in 1974? Someone will know. Are there enough Jewish players in all baseball history to make a team? And then they start to name them. Such and such a player had a fractured tibia four years ago and hasn’t been the same since. They seem like a pack of dogs playing in the yard, yelping and nuzzling, a smell of wet fur in the air, licking and jumping. Without H. there I feel awkward. But then I don’t.
    What I wait for is the moment when the quarterback swings back his arm and hurls the ball halfway down the field and his receiver, outrunning by a half a step his pursuer, puts his hands in the air and pulls down the ball, as if it was always meant to be in his arms, as if it was choreographed that way, and the crowd cheers and I feel for a moment as if anything is possible. Strange that large men can commit such acts of God-like grace.
    I lose the football pool. I, like H., bet out of loyalty, not sense. The odds are always against me. There was a purity and an absoluteness in H.’s attachment to his teams. His heart could be broken by a dropped pass, a stumble at a crucial moment, a kick that fell short of the goal posts. This drama is the way some men play with fate. Sitting in the room before the television set, nibbling on cookies, I think of H. Not sadly. Not with pain. I just think of him. Love wells up from far within, the way the whale breaks, the spout shooting upwards, the smooth surface of

    the waves splinter into foam, the dorsal fin rises across the surface of the water. Glorious—even if the image is used in a TV ad for life insurance.

    • • •

    I see a play about a woman dying of breast cancer. Her life ends when one character whispers in her ear the best joke in the world, a joke so funny that the listener laughs to death. The conceit is both charming and grating. Would that death were so easy. I have thought about it. The win-dow, pills, the ocean, the gas stove—I hold the idea in my mind, saving it for the right moment the way one might a good champagne, a piece of jewelry reserved for such a special occasion that it hasn’t yet arrived. Not right now. My children would grieve. I would not want to cause them pain. They should not have to lose two parents within a short time span. Aged orphans they will one day be but they should have time to get used to the idea. I am loathe to leave the story before its end, although I suppose I will in time, just not now. I still have friends I want to meet, movies I haven’t yet seen, books to read that might not even have been written yet. Old age with its dribble and tremble and watery eyes and half-hearing ears is not a delightful prospect, but erasure can only promise itself. The choice remains mine. I’ll take it when I’m ready. I won’t need a joke, especially when the joke’s on me.

    • • •

    A man calls me. He is a widower. He lives in Brooklyn. He is an acquaintance of a friend of mine. He is a doctor. His wife died five years ago of a