"I'm not sure."

I threw some cash onto the table and helped her to her feet. She was on the verge of collapse, giving me nearly all of her weight.

"You're always carrying me, aren't you?" she murmured.

I got her into a cab and gave the driver my address. The snow was falling heavily now. Liz leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.

"The lady okay?" the driver asked. He was wearing a turban and had a heavy black beard. I knew he meant, Is she drunk? "The lady looks sick. No puking in my cab."

I handed him a hundred-dollar bill. "Does this help?"

The traffic was like glue. It took us nearly thirty minutes to get downtown. New York was softening under the snow. A white Christmas: how happy everyone was going to be. My apartment was on the second floor; I would have to carry her. I waited for a neighbor to come through the door and asked him to hold it open, guided Liz out of the cab, and lifted her into my arms.

"Wow," my neighbor said. "She doesn't look too good."

He followed us to my apartment door, took the key from my pocket, and opened that as well. "Do you want me to call 911?" he asked.

"It's okay, I've got this. She had a little too much to drink is all."

He winked despicably. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

I got her out of her coat and carried her into the bedroom. As I lay her on my bed, she opened her eyes and turned her face toward the window.

"It's snowing," she said, as if this were the most amazing thing in the world.

She closed them again. I removed her glasses and shoes, draped a blanket over her, and doused the lights. There was an overstuffed chair close to the window where I liked to read. I sat down and waited in the dark to see what would happen next.

Sometime later, I awoke. I looked at my watch: it was nearly two A.M. I went to Liz and placed my palm to her forehead. She felt cool, and I believed that the worst had passed.

Her eyes opened. She looked around cautiously, as if she wasn't quite sure where she was.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

She didn't answer right away. Her voice was very soft. "Better, I think. Sorry to scare you."

"That's perfectly all right."

"It happens sometimes like that, but it goes away. Until sometime when it doesn't, I guess."

I had nothing to say to that. "Let me get you some water."

I filled a glass in the bathroom and brought it to her. She lifted her head off the pillow and sipped. "I was having the strangest dream," she said. "The chemo is what does it. The stuff's like LSD. I thought that was over, though."

A thought occurred to me. "I have a present for you."

"You do?"

"Wait here."

I kept her glasses in my desk. I returned to the bedroom and placed them in her hand. She studied them for a long moment.

"I was wondering when you'd get around to giving these back."

"I like to put them on sometimes."

"And here I didn't get you anything. I'm just appalling." She was crying, just a little. She looked up, meeting my eye. "You're not the only one who blew it you know."

"Liz?"

She reached out her hand touched my cheek. "It's funny. You can live your whole life and then suddenly know that you didn't do it right at all."

I wrapped her fingers with my own. Outside, the snow fell upon the sleeping city.

"You should kiss me," she said.

"Do you want me to?"

"I think that's the dumbest thing you've ever said."

I did. I brought my mouth to hers. It was a soft, quiet kiss-peaceful would be the word-the kind that obliterates the world and makes all time turn around it. Infinity in a moment, the hem of creation brushing the face of the waters.

"I should stop," I said.

"No, you shouldn't." She began to unbutton her blouse. "Just please be careful with me. I'm kind of breakable, you know."

21.

We became lovers. I don't think I'd ever truly understood the word. I don't mean just sex, though there was that-unhurried, meticulous, a form of passion I had never known existed. I mean that we lived as richly as two people ever could, with a feeling of absolute rightness. We left the apartment only to walk. A deep cold had followed the snow, sealing the city in whiteness. Jonas's name was never mentioned. It wasn't a subject we were avoiding. It had simply ceased to matter.

We both knew she would have to return eventually; she could not simply step out of her life. Nor could I imagine the two of us being apart for one minute of the time she had left. I believed she felt the same. I wanted to be there when it happened. I wanted to be touching her, holding her hand, telling her how much I loved her as she faded away.

One morning the week after Christmas, I awoke in bed alone. I found her in the kitchen, sipping tea, and knew what she was about to tell me.

"I have to go back."

"I know," I said. "Where?"

"Greenwich first. My mother must be worried. Then Boston, I suppose." She didn't have to say more; her meaning was plain. Jonas would be home soon.

"I understand," I said.

We took a cab to Grand Central. Few words had been spoken since her announcement. I felt like I was being taken to face a firing squad. Be brave, I told myself. Be the sort of man who stands tall with his eyes open, waiting for the guns' report.

Her train was called. We walked to the platform where it awaited. She put her arms around me and began to cry. "I don't want to do this," she said.

"Then don't. Don't get on the train."

I felt her hesitancy. Not just the words; I felt it in her body. She couldn't make herself let go.

"I have to."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

People were hurrying past. The customary announcement crackled overhead: All aboard for New Haven, Bridgeport, Westport, New Canaan, Greenwich ... A door was closing; soon it would be sealed.

"Then come back. Do what you have to do, and then come back. We can go someplace."

"Where?"

"Italy, Greece. An island in the Pacific. It doesn't matter. Somewhere nobody can find us."

"I want to."

"Say yes."

A frozen moment; then she nodded against me. "Yes."

My heart soared. "How long do you need to tie things up?"

"A week. No, two."

"Make it ten days. Meet me here, under the clock. I'll have everything ready."

"I love you," she said. "I think I did from the start."

"I loved you even before that."

A last kiss, she stepped toward the train, then turned and embraced me again.

"Ten days," she said.

I made ready. There were things I needed to do. I composed a hasty email to my dean, requesting a leave of absence. I wouldn't be around to know if it had been accepted, but I hardly cared. I could imagine no life beyond the next six months.

I called a friend who was an oncologist. I explained the situation, and he told me what would happen. Yes, there would be pain, but mostly a slow receding.

"It's not something you should manage on your own," he said. When I didn't reply, he sighed. "I'll phone in a prescription."

"For what?"

"Morphine. It will help." He paused. "At the end, you know, a lot of people take more than they should, strictly speaking."

I said I understood and thanked him. Where should we go? I had read an article in the Times about an island in the Aegean where half the population lived to be a hundred. There was no valid scientific explanation; the residents, most of whom were goat herders, took it as a fact of life. A man was quoted in the article as saying, "Time is different here." I bought two first-class tickets to Athens and found a ferry schedule online. A boat traveled to the island only once a week. We would have to wait two days in Athens, but there were worse places. We would visit the temples, the great, indestructible monuments of a lost world, then vanish.

The day arrived. I packed my bags; we would be going straight from the station to the airport for a ten P.M. flight. I could barely think straight; my emotions were an indescribable jumble. Joy and sadness had fused together in my heart. Foolishly, I had planned nothing else for the day and was forced to sit idly in my apartment until late afternoon. I had no food on hand, having cleaned out the refrigerator, but doubted I could have eaten anyway.

I took a cab to the station. Five o'clock was, once again, the appointed hour. Liz would be taking an Amtrak train to Stamford, to see her mother, in Greenwich, one last time, then a local to Grand Central. With each passing block my feelings annealed into a pure sense of purpose. I knew, as few men did, why I had been born in the first place; everything in my life had called me forward to this moment. I paid the cabbie and went inside to wait. It was a Saturday, the crowds light. The opalescent clock faces read 4:36. Liz's train was due in twenty minutes.

My pulse quickened as the announcement came over the speakers: Now arriving at track 16 ... I considered going to the platform to head her off, but we might lose each other in the crowd. Passengers surged into the main hall. Soon it became clear that Liz was not among them. Perhaps she had taken a later train; the New Haven line ran every thirty minutes. I checked my phone, but there were no messages. The next train came, and still no Liz. I began to worry that something had happened. It did not occur to me yet that she had changed her mind, though the idea was waiting in the wings. At six o'clock I called her cell, but it went straight to voicemail. Had she shut it off?

Train by train, my panic grew. It was now obvious that Liz would not be coming, and yet I continued to wait, to hope. I was hanging by my fingertips over an abyss. Time and again I tried her cell, with the same result. This is Elizabeth Lear. I'm not available to take your call. The clocks' hands mocked me with their turning. It was nine, then ten. I had waited five hours. What a fool I'd been.

I left the station and began to walk. The air was cruel; the city seemed like a huge dead thing, some monstrous joke. I did not button my coat or put on my gloves, preferring to feel the pain of the wind. Sometime later I looked up to find I was on Broadway, near the Flatiron. I realized I had left my suitcase at the station. I thought to go back and retrieve it-surely somebody would have turned it in-but the flame of this impulse quickly extinguished itself. A suitcase-who cared? Of course there was the morphine to consider. Perhaps whoever found it would enjoy themselves.

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step. I entered the first restaurant I came to, in the lobby of an office building-sleek and upscale, full of chrome and stone. A few couples were still eating, though it was after midnight. I took a place at the bar, ordered a Scotch, finished it before the bartender had returned the bottle to the rack, and requested a refill.

"Excuse me. You're Professor Fanning, aren't you?"

I turned to the woman sitting a few stools away. She was young, a little heavy but quite striking, Indian or Middle Eastern, with raven-black hair, full cheeks, and a bow-shaped mouth. Above her generically sexy black skirt she wore a filmy top the color of cream. A glass of something with fruit in it sat on the bar in front of her, its rim stained with crescents of rust-colored lipstick.

"I'm sorry?"

She smiled. "I guess you don't remember me." When I didn't reply, she added, "Molecular Biology 100? Spring 2002?"

"You were my student."

She laughed. "Not much of one. You gave me a C minus."

"Oh. Sorry about that."

"Trust me, no offense taken. The human race has a lot to thank you for, actually. Many people are alive today because I didn't go to med school."

I had no recollection of her; hundreds of young women like her came and went from my classes. It is also not the same thing to see someone from the distance of a podium at eight o'clock in the morning, wearing sweatpants and furiously tapping a laptop, as to find them sitting three stools away in a bar, dressed for a night of adventure.

"So, where did you end up?" A dull remark; I was simply looking for something to say, since conversation was now inevitable.

"Publishing, where else?" She leveled her gaze at me. "You know, I had the biggest crush on you. I'm talking major. A lot of the girls did."

I realized she was drunk, making such a confession without even telling me her name.

"Miss-?"

She moved to the stool next to mine and extended her hand. Her nails were perfectly manicured, painted to match her lips. "Nicole."

"It's been a long night for me, Nicole."

"I could sort of tell, the way you put away that Scotch." She touched her hair for no reason. "What do you say, Professor? Buy a girl a drink? It's your chance to make up for that C."

She was plainly amusing herself, a woman who knew what she had, what it could do. I glanced past her; just a handful of other people were in the room. "Aren't you-?"