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not a spot of Parisian dust in the spotless Parisian air, all before me appearing so perfect in every minute detail that it was as though a smudge had been snatched from my eye, as though the crystal air itself had been chiseled into a magnifying lens. The morning was all the more precious for being stolen, not from the rainy week just past, but from the season about to descend. There wouldn’t be many more like this, not for a while. We sat outside on slat-bottomed chairs, at a trendy little place on a square near the Place de la République, the customers around us hushed and heliotropic, faces arrayed chins up toward the low, sharp sun, like identical daisies in a window box. The place was named Le Faux Henry.
    â€œTell me all you’ve been up to,” Willem said. He was enthusiastic to such a cheerful extreme I was afraid he might rub his hands together. He had on a thick, cabled alpaca sweater, jeans, and soft calfskin loafers with the soles still pink, the sort of casual dress that made a point of not dressing down, posh enough to put you in mind of the fineness of the suit left hanging at home, and the fineness of the home the suit is hung in, though his home of the moment was as provisional as mine (albeit, I suspected, even more luxurious). His jeans were creased. His air of ease was plump as a peach. Hadn’t it ever been thus with Willem? Even when we were students together in med school: plump as a peach, even then.
    We’d met in our first year, when we were both still downy with ideals and indecision, still dabbling in undergrad lit and music and philosophy (and also, for a while, in each other), still awhirl with the meaning of it all, and from there we survived the whole long course of it, from the oak and slate, chalk and bromide of Professor Maasterlich’s unpassable Introduction to Surgical Practices lectures on through our graduations and residencies and the commencement of our specialties.
    And later we’d worked together, sporadically over the years, but often, and I’d watched him put on the assertive adult plumage of the Lifelong Purpose and grow into his identity. He became Dr. Madsen, for better or worse, with all his devotions and pomposities. Not a bad person, as far as I knew; just a surgeon, society’s most ambitious and useful, and so most amply rewarded, sadist. And I was the anesthesiologist, his Tonto, his Panza, his abettor and antagonist, letting him work even deeper mischief by quelling the sting of it, never quite sure whose side I was on, his or the patient’s, or mine. I still remembered him as I’d first seen him, the clumsy shy novice blustering his way toward confidence.
    And then came the Singleton affair, that horror, Willem and I both accused of gross malpractice—negligent homicide, in effect, not to put too fine a point on it—in the case of a woman who had died during a routine valve replacement when it seemed she should have lived, according to the very fine medical expertise of the very fine lawyer her very wealthy family retained. We prevailed, though at some cost to our friendship, each of our lawyers preferring a strategy of every man for himself and to heck with solidarity. Willem and I were never sure if we were in it together or if one of us was about to be thrown beneath the other’s bus, which I’m sure would have happened the instant one of our lawyers found it the least convenient to shift blame entirely to either
the cutting into
or
the putting under
—to Willem or to myself. Our long affiliation did not survive the victory.
    It had been eleven years since the suit. My news of Willem during the interim had come through the journals and the OR gossip, how he’d branched out from surgery to charity, from heart to whole patient, and from there to the whole of society; was flying around the globe setting up public-health initiatives, keynoting conferences, and humbly accepting high honors; had