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things like, ‘Now that I am old, I shall wear more purple.’”
    There was a polished silver pot of coffee on the table. Edward poured some into her cup. He was a gentleman of the old school—she didn’t know if she’d ever seen him without a tie and jacket—and, with his courtly formality, he’d always struck her as somehow timeless. He’d always been a reassuring presence in her life.
    “Do you have exciting news for me?” she said.
    She was half joking. She had published a book two months earlier, called
How to Look at a Woman.
A collection of essays about intellectuals and activists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Rosa Parks, it was her sixth book, and the fifth that she had done with Edward.
    Her question was a joke because when a book has been out for almost two months, nothing exciting can happen. One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it’s become like the movie business, where a movie has to “open big”; if a book hasn’t caught anybody’s interest in the first two weeks of its life, it’s not going to. It was hard to bring herself to walk into a bookstore, because she knew that her book was already about to disappear from the shelves, like milk that has reached its expiration date.
    But it was also not a joke, because you never stop hoping.
    He didn’t even bother to answer.
    They’d planned to meet for lunch two months ago. It was supposed to have been a celebratory lunch, to mark the publication of her book. But Edward had been ill, and then Edward had been busy, and now it was less like a christening than a wake.
    After they ordered, she took a large manila envelope from her bag and slid it across the table.
    “On to the next thing,” she said.
    Weeks ago, he’d asked her to give him whatever she had of her memoir.
    “This’ll be a treat,” he said. “But . . . well, it brings me to what I wanted to tell you about. I’m afraid I’m going to be reading it as a civilian.”
    She didn’t understand.
    “I didn’t want you to hear about it from anyone else, and I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I’m afraid my condition has returned, and I’m finding it harder and harder to do my job and fight my cancer. I’ve given notice. I’m retiring at the end of next week.”
    “Jesus, Edward. I’m sorry.”
    “I’m sorry too,” he said.
    “How have you been feeling?”
    “I usually have about one good hour a day. Which isn’t that much of a change, really. Before I got this thing I used to have about two good hours a day.”
    “Are you going to do more chemo?”
    “Chemo, radiation, some experimental stuff. They’re going to do everything they can and one or two things they can’t. They’ll be carpet-bombing me. I’ll be North Vietnam.”
    He smiled, as if he’d said something witty, so Florence smiled too, but he hadn’t said anything witty, of course. Carpet-bombing as a figure of speech to describe chemotherapy had been around forever. She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we’re living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand.
    But it probably wasn’t a moment to be mourning the way we use language.
    “How’s Susan?”
    “Susan is being brave. Susan is being great.”
    Florence had known him, worked with him, in that peculiar intimacy in which a writer and an editor can sometimes work, for twenty years now, but she barely knew his wife, and she had no idea how happy he was in his marriage.
    “Don’t start preparing your eulogy, though. Even if this round of treatments doesn’t stick, they’re telling me I can hope for five more years. I haven’t started pricing funeral plots. I just don’t want to spend the time I’ve got left behind a desk.”
    “What’ll you be doing?”
    “Traveling. Gardening. Visiting my grandchildren. Too many things to count.”
    She nodded, trying to appear as if she were still in the room,