There was a pause while she listened, accepted a bagged biscotti and coffee, nodded her thanks, and then spoke into the telephone as she jangled the heavy jeweled chain around her thin wrist:
“We’ve been through this many times, Jerome. You are forty-four years old. I am eighty-three years old. Depending on what chance and heredity bring your way, you will live about forty more years according to current actuarial projections. I, on the other hand, should have, at most, another seven to ten years. I am not interested in risking what my husband and I have saved. It is not because we intend to retire to Borneo on our savings. We wish to give to a set of charities, charities that support the continuation of human life. Get back to me when you’ve thought about this.”
She hung up and looked at me.
“Lewis, you are the only one of my current clients who does not believe in God and does not want to live forever.”
“If there is a God, I don’t like him,” I said.
“So you have indicated in the past. Almond or macadamia?” she asked, hoisting a biscotti.
“Almond.”
“Tell me about your week,” she said, “while I enjoy your gift.”
I told her, talked for almost twenty minutes, and then stopped. She had finished her biscotti and coffee and my almond biscotti.
“Progress again,” she said.
“Progress?”
“You made a commitment to Ames. You offered something resembling a commitment to Sally. After four years you are putting down tentative tendrils in Sarasota.”
“Maybe.”
“Have you done your homework?”
I reached into my pocket and came out with the stack of lined index cards on which people’s favorite, or just remembered, first lines were. She took them.
“Why did I have you collect favorite first lines rather than jokes?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think it is time for you to have a new beginning,” she said, quickly going through the cards, glasses perched on the end of her nose. “And now yours, Lewis, your book.”
“ Moby-Dick,” I said.
“What do you think the book is about?” Ann asked.
“A lone survivor,” I said. “I bought a copy of the book at Brant’s and copied the line.”
I took out my notebook.
“Is it that hard for you to remember? Almost everyone knows it. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ ”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I read what I have on the card?”
“All right,” she said, lifting a hand in acceptance, “read.”
“ ‘It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.’ ”
“That’s not the beginning of Moby-Dick, Lewis,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s the end.”