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nosebleeds, and now me with this leg. We’re the goddamn gimps of the universe.’
    Trause had never been overly attentive to his appearance, but that night he looked particularly disheveled to me, and from the rumpled condition of his blue jeans and cotton sweater – not to speak of the grayish tinge that had spread over the bottoms of his white socks – I gathered he’d been wearing that outfit for several days in a row. Not surprisingly, his hair was mussed, and the back strands had been flattened and stiffened after lying on the sofa for so many hours in the past week. The truth was that John looked haggard, considerably older than he had ever looked to me before, but when a man is in pain, and no doubt losing much sleep because of that pain, he can hardly be expected to look his best. I wasn’t alarmed by what I saw, but Grace, who was normally the most unruffled person I knew, seemed flustered and upset by John’s condition. Before we could get down to the business of ordering the food, she grilled him for ten solid minutes about doctors, medicines, and prognoses, and then, once he’d assured her he wasn’t going to die, she moved on to a host of practical concerns: grocery shopping, cooking, trash removal, laundry, the daily routine. Madame Dumas had it all under control, John said, referring to the woman from Martinique who had been cleaning his apartment for the past two years, and when she wasn’t available, her daughter came instead. ‘Twenty years old,’ he added, ‘and very intelligent. Nice to look at, too, by the way. She doesn’t walk so much as glide around the room, as if her feet weren’t touching the floor. It gives me a chance to practice my French.’
    The matter of John’s leg aside, he seemed glad to be with us, and he talked more than he usually did on such occasions, rattling on steadily for most of the evening. I can’t be certain, but I believe it was the pain that loosened his tongue and kept him going. The words must have provided a distraction from the tumult coursing through his leg, a frenzied sort of relief. That, and the vast quantities of alcohol he consumed as well. As each new bottle of wine was uncorked, John was the first to hold out his glass, and of the three bottles we drank that night, roughly half the contents wound up in his system. That makes a bottle and a half of wine, along with the two glasses of straight Scotch he drank toward the end. I had seen him drink that much a few times in the past, but no matter how well lubricated John became, he never appeared to be drunk. No slurred speech, no glassiness in the eyes. He was a big person – six-two, a shade under two hundred pounds – and he could hold it.
    ‘About a week before this leg thing started,’ he said, ‘I got a call from Tina’s brother Richard. 5 I hadn’t heard from him in a long time. Not since the day of the funeral, in fact, which means we’re talking about eight years – more than eight years. I’d never had much to do with her family while we were married, and now that she wasn’t there anymore, I hadn’t bothered to stay in touch with them. Nor they with me, for that matter – not that I particularly cared. All those Ostrow brothers, with their cruddy furniture store on Springfield Avenue and their boring wives and their mediocre children. Tina had about eight or nine first cousins, but she was the only one with any spirit, the only one who’d had the gumption to break out of that little New Jersey world and try to make something of herself. So it surprised me when Richard called the other day. He lives in Florida now, he said, and had come to New York on a business trip. Would I be interested in going out to dinner with him? Somewhere nice, he said, his treat. Since I didn’t have any other plans, I accepted. I don’t know why I did, but there wasn’t any compelling reason not to, and so we arranged to meet the next night at eight o’clock.
    ‘You have to understand about