n-o-o” she’d say, and then to him once, “Don’t worry. He loves you as much as he loves me. It’s just he thinks you can take care of yourself and I need protection. He has such old-fashioned notions about females.” One hears of dogs suffering when their owners die, but cats? Wasn’t it Gwen who told him that her dissertation advisor’s dog, a corgi, hours after the man died of pancreatic cancer in his summer home in Maine, walked out of the house and down to the shore that bordered the property and swam out into the ocean and drowned? It was Gwen, this happened the summer before they met, and it was another type of cancer, one also very quick and with a small chance of curing, and the dog kept swimming farther and farther out — the man’s children on shore were calling her back and then went after her in a rowboat — till the waves went over her and she disappeared. “Was she found?” he remembers asking, and she said “Days later, a couple of coves away.” He’d never heard anything like that with cats. Devoted, but dying? He’d have to ask someone who knows much more about them than he, but he won’t; he’ll forget. Or something. Gwen said she took her advisor’s death very badly. He and his wife by this time had become close friends of hers. He unlocks and opens the kitchen door and goes outside. Maybe he is out. “Sleek? Sleek?” he says. Walks to both ends of the carport and a few feet along the driveway. “Sleek, you out here?” We don’t want to lose you. That would be too much,” and he starts crying and wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “Oh, shit, what the hell is happening to me?” he says. “This whole fucking thing is making me crazy. Please, Sleek, if you’re out here, listen to me. You have to come home.” He whistles for him and makes tsking sounds with his mouth, something he does to get him back into the house when it’s getting dark outside or into the kitchen from another room when he puts fresh food on the floor. But what’s he thinking? Cat’s got to be inside. It’s what he previously thought: the kids would have made sure he was in before they locked the outside doors and shut off all the lights and went to their rooms. He’s probably with one of them. If he is, they’d keep the door partially open, and he goes in to look and both their doors are closed. He’s still sure Sleek’s with one of them. Just, whoever he’s with forgot to leave her door open so he could get water or food in the kitchen or use the litter box in the hallway bathroom. But they both know if he wants to get out of a room and the door’s shut, he’d stand on his back paws and scratch the door till they opened it. Everything’s all right. Again, he’s making something out of nothing. Well, he’s fragile; has become so; look at it that way, what can he do? He’s grieving, let’s face it, grieving, and that might go on for he doesn’t know how long, so cry all you want. Cry when you feel like crying. Cry when the feeling swoops over you for you don’t know what reason, but don’t go batty, that’s all. And if you can, try to keep it to when you’re alone. If the kids happen to witness it, and it wasn’t that their crying precipitated it, that’d be okay, too. Is he making sense? He thinks so. As he said before, everything’s okay, at least for now. Though maybe Sleek heard him calling his name before and only just came back. He looks outside though the kitchen door and then goes outside to look. No, Sleek’s inside. And while he’s out here, should he get today’s newspapers by the mailbox? It’ll only take a few seconds. But a neighbor might drive down the hill on his way to work or the gym and stop to ask him how he is and he’d have to speak, if he couldn’t wave him off, and then what? He’s not ready. And he doesn’t want to read the news. Knows that much about himself. Doesn’t want to hear it on the radio either. Doesn’t want to look at the papers for anything that might be in them. He won’t cancel his subscriptions, but he doesn’t know when he might want to look at them again. If he thinks it’s going to be a while — more than two weeks — he’ll cancel. But now he doesn’t see himself sitting in his Morris chair with his mug of coffee on the chair’s arm, as he’s done with the Sun just about every morning for around the last twenty years. Or the Times at night before dinner for probably the same number of years, with a drink on the chair’s arm. First reading the headlines of each paper and then the beginnings of two or three of the articles underneath them. Then turning to page two of the first section of the Times to see what section and page the obituaries of noteworthy people are in. If it’s of someone who might interest him — a writer, a war hero, a baseball player or movie actor or actress or entertainer like that who was prominent when he was a kid or till he was around sixteen or eighteen — he usually reads it. The ones of fiction writers and poets and literary critics he always reads. The Sun’s obituaries he’s less interested in unless it’s someone he knows or is familiar with personally or the obituary headline says he went through some war experience or something like that, and they’re always in the same place in the paper, right after the op-ed page at the end of the first section. Then reading the various sections of the papers in no regular order. And today’s weather, tonight’s, tomorrow’s, sometimes the box that has the national forecast, and on the same weather report page, what the temperatures are in Fargo and Phoenix and Los Angeles and Des Moines. Old friends of his now live in the last two cities, or the friend in Iowa in a small city forty miles from Des Moines, and he liked to see what the weather was like for them there. Fargo and Phoenix because it gets so cold in one and hot in the other and it sort of was a game he played with himself comparing the two temperature extremes on the same day. He also checked almost every day what the temperature and forecast were in Paris. Gwen and he had lived there by themselves at different times in their lives and stayed there three times together for up to two weeks, once with Rosalind and the last time with both kids, and talked about renting an apartment there for a couple of months on his next sabbatical. Could they have done that? Doesn’t think so. Not after her first stroke, or definitely her second. Of course, New York too, and he also would have liked to see what the weather was like every day in the area they summered at in Maine for so many years, but the closest city listed, Portland, is more than a hundred-fifty miles away. Just realized: he exchanges letters with those two friends every month or so, and next time he writes them, and he doesn’t know when he’ll feel like doing that again, he’ll have to tell them about Gwen. “I have very bad news. My dear Gwen…” But very short. If he first gets a letter from them — he forgets who owes whom — they’ll ask about her and hope she’s well, as they always do, and for him to give her their best or love. If he doesn’t write them for months after that, they’ll sense — probably even before — something’s wrong because of her two previous strokes, and call, and he’ll have to tell them then. “I want to make this quick. It’s been months, but I still have trouble talking about it. Our dear Gwen…” Maybe he’d be better off writing them a brief note in the next week. In almost one sentence, that she suffered another stroke at home and died in the hospital and when — the exact date — and that he’s unable to write any more about it now. And if they call to offer their condolences and find out how he is? “As you got from my note, it’s impossible for me to talk about it. Maybe down the line sometime. I’m sorry for being so abrupt — you know that’s not the typical me — but I’ll have to say goodbye.” No, they’ll worry. Just say it’s been a terrific blow, but he’s all right and for them not to worry about him and he’ll call sometime soon, which he won’t. What’s he doing? There is no way; he can see that. Maybe if he gets the kids to write his two friends about Gwen and anybody else who doesn’t know she died but probably should, though he can’t think of anyone else right now. In her address book and computer she has a number of names of friends and scholars in her field and home-care providers — women who looked after her while she was recovering and he was at work — they say they didn’t contact about her death or for the memorial, but he assumes they knew what they were doing. Didn’t mean anything to him who came to the memorial or not. They can say to his two friends that their father asked them to write. But they shouldn’t say anything more about him except, if they want, that he’s all right. Ah, let them write what they want. They’re bright, tactful, sensitive to other people’s feelings; they’ll write good letters. The important thing is to get it out of the way. They can even use the same letter for both his friends and anyone else they might want to write to about Gwen. So that’s what he’ll do. As he said, his friends and whoever else will just have to understand why it’s not coming from him. So where was he? Thinking about something, but what? The papers. News. What he read in them every day and in what order. Important? Doubts it. But he was thinking about it for some reason, so maybe he’ll find out why by finishing the thought. Reviews after what was the last thing he said he read. And that was? Forgets.