I painted for seven days straight. If she had still been alive, Michael’s mother would have left me again, and this time it would have been quite deserved. I worked as only someone who lives without dependents or lovers can, but somehow, for the first time in years, I thought I felt the touch of her hand on my shoulder as I paused for breath or to get water for myself or the paint, and I cried a little, as old men sometimes do. Death has a tendency with age to gather in around one, taking first the luminaries and friends of that subtly older generation one assumes will last for ever, and then picking off strangers and old flames, old enemies and finally one’s family, until what you might call without irony a skeleton crew remains, each of us fighting to be the last—or perhaps the second to last, to leave some poor sod the one who truly dies alone. Eleni was among the first of those I loved to go out of the world.