“No doubt he came for his money,” she said. “Thank you for keeping him at bay while I rested. In the future I shall leave a spare check with you. You can give it to him right away and thereby free yourself of any obligation to entertain him.”

“All I did was give him cake.”

“And now we do not have enough for afternoon tea. For shame, Mr. Geist.”

“What do you mean?”

“See for yourself.”

I lifted up the plastic cover; the rest of the Sachertorte was gone. “There was plenty yesterday.”

“Perhaps he took it when you weren’t looking,” she said. “That would be true to form.”

I gripped the empty plate in both hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“Patience, Mr. Geist. An old lady can survive one day without her confections. Now, you had a request.”

I barely heard her; I was still fuming.

“Mr. Geist.”

“Pardon?”

“You spoke of it a few days ago,” she said. “We never pursued the matter.”

I remembered now: my mother’s call. I told Alma about the trip, describing it as a family reunion and omitting the memorial. “I said I had to ask you first.”

“Naturally you may go. Although I feel obliged to note that you do not seem overly enthusiastic about the prospect.”

“I’m not.”

“In that case, you may use me as an excuse, if you wish to beg off.”

I hesitated. “I really should go.”

“Very well, then.”

“It’ll only be for a couple of days.”

“Please, don’t rush on my account. I can get along quite well without you.” She half-smiled. “You’ve never spoken of your family.”

I shrugged.

“May I ask why?”

“It’s nothing personal. There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You are too modest.”

“I’m not. They never met Wittgenstein. They wouldn’t even know who that is.”

“They produced you, Mr. Geist.”

“I’ve never understood how.”

She waited for me to say more. I didn’t, and she said, “Of course, your business is your own.”

She sounded different then. Perhaps she was annoyed at me for acting cagey when she had revealed so much about herself. Or maybe she meant what she said, and what I heard in her voice was concern. Either way, the moment passed, and we moved on to more mutually agreeable subjects.

And back and forth I went.

What really got to me was how Alma came alive in his presence, becoming, for a short while at least, positively coquettish. His flattery was so transparently phony that I couldn’t understand how a woman of her intelligence and sophistication would fall for it. I found the process painful to behold. As weeks went on and I spent more time observing them, I began to understand why I couldn’t draw a bead on Eric’s personality: he had none. He responded only to immediate stimuli, and then only in pursuit of his own desires. He wanted money from Alma, and in order to get it, he rearranged himself as necessary. If she was feeling flirtatious, he flirted with her. If she appeared withdrawn, he was gentle and inquisitive. That he could so rapidly adjust his own mood to suit hers proved to me that he had no substance whatsoever. I couldn’t possibly do the same. I was a real person, with an independent mind; I lacked his chameleon’s gifts. But then how did he manage to fool her? Or, rather, why did she allow herself to be fooled? I tortured myself with this question. Endlessly I compared myself to him. I was the book; he was the movie. The more I turned the metaphor over in my mind, the more apt it felt. He was all surface, I had depth. He provided passive diversion, I required rigor and concentration. I was subtle where he was obvious, refined where he was crass, etc., etc., all manner of self-congratulatory sniping that did not improve my mood one whit. Because I could not deny the way Alma looked at him. I could not wish him away, and reluctantly I came to the conclusion that I had once again overestimated my own importance, and underestimated people’s capacity for self-deception. Sometimes, it seemed, a lady just wanted to go to the movies.

Far more troubling, however, was the correlation between his appearances and her attacks. Within a few hours of his departure, she would be struck down, retiring to her room for the remainder of the day. In the evenings I would creep upstairs to leave her a tray of food, which always went untouched but which I stubbornly went on preparing. I could see the harm he did her, and that was enough to make me want to bar him from coming inside. It was not my place, though, and so I stood by, grimacing, whenever he rang the bell, interrupting our conversation; when he joined us, uninvited, for dinner. They would laugh and nudge each other with private jokes, and I would stew silently until, unable to bear it any longer, I shuffled out of the room, inventing appointments. I walked for hours, muttering to myself, kicking divots in the turf along the banks of the Charles. Or else I would stalk to the Science Center, sit down at a computer and check repeatedly for e-mails that never came. I scoured the Web for information on both Alma and Eric, believing that the more I knew about them, the more I could control them. A patently childish idea, and anyway neither of them had any presence in cyberspace. Alma, understandably. And Eric presumably because he had long ceased to participate in normal society. That I could not find his name anywhere told me that he hadn’t finished school (if he had even started it). As far as I knew he didn’t have a job, other than sponging off Alma and ruining my life.

Or I would stand outside Yasmina’s building, my former home, picturing her inside, draining pasta as she chatted on the phone to her fiance, letting my hatred of him overlap with that of Eric, twin jealousies intermingling, each boosting the other exponentially, my sense of aggrievement mounting, working myself into such a frenzy that by the time I got home I was in no state to do anything other than lie in my bed in the dark, snorting and staring at the ceiling.

“Patience, Mr. Geist.”

Patience for what? What was I supposed to be waiting for? It was impossible for me not to hate Eric, especially as summer descended like a cloak and Alma’s attacks grew in both frequency and severity. She needed less of him, not more. Yet he kept on coming, and she kept on seeing him in, only to be undone with pain after his departure, check in hand.

I basically ceased to call Dr. Cargill, whose instructions were always the same: let Alma be, don’t panic, it would pass. I began to doubt the wisdom of this approach. True, it might have been thus dozens of times before. But what if this was the one time the symptoms proved fatal? What if something else had happened, something unexpected, a stroke or a slip in the bath? Anything could happen.

June became July; July, August. Alma grew haggard, spending more time in her room than out of it, and leaving me free most of the day. I could have done whatever I wanted. I could have gone to day games at Fenway. I could have jogged around Fresh Pond. I could have watched the campus laze along, ogled the summer-school students. I could have acted my age, a regular young man in the prime of his life. But I denied myself. All day long I hung around the house, waiting for Alma to come out and ask me once again for conversation, longing to reclaim the rhythm I had so loved and which I felt fading, fading. I let all the blooming days pass me by unnoticed, and at night, when I was insomniac and I heard her above me, walking in circles, I wished that she could dial down her pride at least enough to let me come sit with her. In her position, I would not have wanted to be alone. Maybe that was my problem: I could imagine only what I would’ve wanted. For her, it was more important never to be seen in a degraded state than to have company. I did my best to accept this truth. She did not want me to pity her, and I tried not to. I don’t know how good a job I did, but I tried.

Eventually I couldn’t help myself. I steamed open the envelope she had left with me, and was shocked to discover that Eric’s check was not for a hundred dollars but five times that. Shocked—and furious. Because it added up to a fortune over the years, because he never failed to give the impression that he was on the brink of penury, because it was so much more than she paid me, as much as my birthday gift. It took tremendous restraint not to tear the check into bits on the spot. I didn’t, because as good as it would have felt, to do so would have been a short-term response to a chronic problem. No, what we needed here was real action, lasting action. There would come a day—I fantasized about it often—when I would stand up to him. Sometimes these fantasies involved me giving him a righteous telling-off. Sometimes they grew violent: I cuffed him, grabbed him by the collar, and tossed him down the front steps, his rump imprinted with the tread of my shoe, like in a cartoon. Always they ended with Alma breaking down, acknowledging that I was right, she had to cut him off, once and for all, I was her protector, her guardian angel, she couldn’t have done it without me, thank you, Mr. Geist, thank you, thank you.

I came up the front porch. I’d gone out for a walk while Daciana cleaned, and my shirt was damp from having crossed over the river to the Business School and back. The Subaru was no longer in the driveway.

“I’ve been knocking,” he said. “I was about to give up.”

I told him to wait outside while I got his check, then went to the library, where I had tucked the envelope away on one of the shelves. Reaching for it, my eye was drawn by the glint of the latch on the gun case.

“Lemme ask you something.”

I hadn’t heard him behind me; my scalp tightened, and I turned, the check pinched tightly between my fingers. “What.”

“Is everything all right here?”

“What do you mean.”

“I mean here. With you and me.”

“Why wouldn’t it be all right.”

“I dunno, man. I feel like you don’t like me very much.”

“I don’t know why you think that.”

“Because every time I come by you look like you want to skin me.” He smiled. “Hey, I’m just messing. Look, I want to tell you something. I think it’s fantastic, everything you do for my aunt. It’s great that she has someone like you. I’d do it myself, if I could.”

I said nothing.

“Seriously, though, I want us to be cool. Are we cool?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, man,” he said. “You’re a shitty liar.”

I felt myself flush. “I don’t not like you.”

“I think that means you don’t like me, either.”

“It, it doesn’t mean that.”

“So you’re saying you do like me.”

“I ...” I looked at him evenly. “I don’t have an opinion.”

His eyes seemed to bug out. Then he laughed loudly, a curiously artificial sound, like a sitcom laugh track.

“Would you keep it down, please,” I said.

“You are funny. You know that? You’re killing me, here.”

“Do you mind? She’s sleeping.”

“Yeah,” he said, still laughing. “Sorry.”

Silence. I held the check out to him.

“Hey, thanks.”

Now that he had gotten his treat, I expected him to go, but he remained there, grinning at me.

“Was there something else you needed,” I said.

“No, man. I’m good. But. Look. You hungry? Cause I’m starving. You want to get some lunch?”

I was in fact very hungry, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I shrugged.

“Come on. On me. Token of my appreciation.”

In the ten minutes it took to walk to Central Square, I must’ve asked myself what I was doing a hundred times. The answer I gave was: for Alma. For Alma I would bear sitting with him. For Alma I would get him away from the house.

“Here we go,” he said, holding open the door of an Irish pub.

At that hour the only other patrons reminded me of my father: working-class men, their hunched postures telling of lives whose sole consolation had been a Barcalounger. The stereo piped something screechy and aggressive; with the volume on low, the overall impression was that the singer wanted to tear apart society, tenderly.

We found a booth and ordered, and Eric took charge of the conversation, asking where I’d been born, how I’d come to Harvard, where I’d lived before I met Alma, how I’d met her, and so forth. Since he’d started coming around, I had done my best to avoid speaking to him. In a way I had set myself up for this lunch, because he could now ask me lots of questions without making it seem like an interrogation, questions that I could not refuse to answer without looking like a jerk. The combined effects of social conditioning and charisma make for a powerful truth serum: I knew what was happening, and still I found myself disclosing more than I knew to be appropriate. More than I had ever told Alma. We had not gotten to my brother’s death when the food came, making me grateful for something to put in my mouth. I waited until he took a bite of his own burger, then attempted to grab the wheel.

“So what is it you do?” I asked.

He paused, mid-chew. “Me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you mean.”

“I mean what do you do.”

“Like a job, you mean?”

“If that’s the answer.”

“All right,” he said. “Well, you know. I have some things going on.”

“Like what kind of things.”

“Business opportunities,” he said. “I can’t really talk about it.”

“Sounds top secret,” I said.

“I don’t want to jinx anything, you know? I do what I have to do. We all have to, right? You do what you need to do. I mean, look at you.”

I put down my burger. “How’s that.”

“I’m saying, you’re right at home. You’re where you belong.”

I said nothing.

“I’m glad you’re around. Like I said, I’d be there myself if I could. It’s not—you know. I’ve lived with her, it wasn’t a good arrangement. But she needs someone around, and I gotta say, man: I’m glad it’s you.

“... thanks.”

“I mean, you really care about her, don’t you.”

“Of course.”

“I can tell. It shows. I care about her, too. You know? I worry about her all the time, though. This thing she has ... Don’t tell me it doesn’t worry you.”

I said nothing.

“Doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

“There you go. Course it does, you care about her. I mean, you have to ask yourself if she’s getting better.” He paused. “What do you think?”

“About what.”

“Is she getting better or not.”

“... no.”

“Getting worse, actually.”

Silence.

“It’s hard to tell,” I said.

“Well, you ask me, my opinion, lately it’s a hell of a lot worse than I’ve ever seen, and I’ve known her a long time. Like, twice, three times a week now?”

“It’s not always that bad.”

“But it is sometimes.”

I nodded.

“That’s crazy, man. It was never like that when I lived with her.”

“I guess so.”

“I’m tellin you. Even from your end you must’ve seen enough to know she ain’t improving.”

I conceded that she was not.

“Right,” he said. “I mean, you and me probably know her better than anyone else at this point. So what do you think?”

“What do you think I think, I think it’s awful.”

“Nnn. That’s not what I mean. What I mean, in your opinion, is she happy?”

I wanted to blurt out yes, of course she was happy, of course. She had me, after all. But could I honestly make that claim? I felt ashamed to realize that in all the time I’d known Alma, I’d never thought to ask myself that question. How does one measure happiness ? Can one assign it a quantity? The utilitarian attempt to do just that is now considered risible. Enumerate the soft signs, then: she still smiled when we talked (although, these days, how often did we talk?): still ate her chocolate (although how often did she feel hungry?). Did these behaviors mean anything? Were they artifacts? Where did the real proof lie? I thought back to our very first conversation, which had begun with the question of whether it is better to be happy or intelligent. At the time, setting those two concepts up in opposition had seemed eminently reasonable. Now, as I sat listening to the quiet fury on the stereo and the waitress telling the bartender to kiss her sweet ass and the men snorting into their beers, I wondered if the happiness I thought I’d given Alma was merely a wan projection of that which she gave me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“If you don’t know,” he said, “the answer’s no.”

I said nothing.

“And, I mean, what if she gets worse. You must have thought about that.”

“I hope not.”

“Course not. I mean, sure, I wish I could stop it. That’s make-believe, though. So, I dunno. If it’s never going to get better, and if it’s getting worse, like it looks like it is, then what do you do with that? I mean, what the hell does a person do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. I just don’t fucking know. Nobody does. You know? Maybe there is no answer.”

“Maybe not.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He studied his fingernails. “I can’t say how you feel about this, but since you care about her, like I do, I bet that you think it, too. Sometimes I wonder if it’d be better if, I mean, better for her to just—whhhp. You know?”

I caught myself nodding and stopped. What, exactly, did he think I knew?

“For her sake,” he said.

What I read in his eyes froze my heart.

“You boys all set?” said the waitress.

Eric smiled at her. “All set.”

“You want a beer, shout.”

“Will do.”

She left. When he spoke again, I heard him through static.

“Look,” he said. “Whatever happens to her—and something’s gotta happen at some point, and for her sake, you have to hope that it’s sooner rather than later. She’s in pain. Sooner rather than later, something’s going to happen. It might be difficult to think about. It might make us uncomfortable. But it’s a fact. Life is life.

“You see what I mean?

“I can tell what you’re thinking. ‘Look at her. She’s already—what. Seventy-eight? Seventy-nine? Even if we sit back and wait, how much longer can it go on?’ And you’d be right to think that way, you would. So let me tell you something else, something you might not know, which is the family history. You’re gonna have to trust me on this when I say that she could hang in there a long, long time. It runs in the family. Longer than anyone wants—her most of all. I mean, you’re smart. Use your imagination for a second. What would it be like for her if this went on for another, I don’t know, twenty years? All of a sudden it’s not so simple anymore.

“Is it.

“So, day to day, for us, what does that mean? I think, and this is just my opinion, but I do think that it’s one based on fact—I think that we, meaning you and I and her, we have to focus on the present. What is happening now. What that leaves us with here, I think, is a balance of power. If you ask me, this is not a bad thing. It’s the way it should be. You’re there. You’re with her. You’re the one she sees every day. Something goes wrong, you’re the one who can say what occurred. How the situation plays out has a lot to do with what you decide.

“That being the case, whatever happens next is really up to you.

“And I’ll tell you something else. My grandma’s gone, my mom and dad are gone. So for her, that’s it, you know? Just me. What do I need a house for? I don’t. I mean, something does happen, it goes down a certain way, fine, it’s my house. Okay. But depending on what plays out, you could have it, if you wanted.

“But you know what, though. I can tell that it’s not something you feel a hundred percent about. I can see that. That’s okay. Of course not; this is something you probably never thought about much, and if you did, you thought about it only from one angle. So let me give you some other angles to consider. It’s not a question of you or me. Look at it as a question of what’s best for her. It’s a question of dignity. You said it yourself: she’s not getting any better. She is in pain. That’s why I’m saying we have to look at this from her perspective. Is she happy? I mean—you said it yourself. No. She isn’t. It’s not natural. Is it? Tell me. Is it natural for someone to have to wake up every day and face that kind of pain? Of course not. I mean, it would be unnatural for anyone, but she’s the kind of person, it’s going to be hard on her, much harder than on your average person. I know that. You know it. You’re not an average kind of person, either, so put yourself in her shoes for a second and ask yourself, ‘Is this really what I want?’ And you tell me what the answer is going to be.” He sat back. “You tell me.”

I said, “Would you excuse me.”

He gestured go ahead.

I locked myself inside a bathroom stall and stood a long while massaging my chest. Had that really happened? Had he offered me the house? Conspired with me over cheeseburgers? Impossible. I knew what he had said. He’d said it and yet he hadn’t.

What did he expect?

Did he expect me to do an accounting?

Did he expect that to come out in his favor?

The world was unreal, the floor tiles swimming, the toilet a grinning menace.

I slapped myself across the face.

The waitress had taken my seat in the booth. As I approached, she slid a piece of paper across the table to Eric and stood up, straightening her skirt.

“You take care,” she said.

“Will do,” he said. To me: “All set?”

I started for the door.

“One sec,” he said.

He was holding up the bill.

Reflexively, I reached for my wallet and removed a twenty.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, snatching it from me and tossing it on the table. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Feeling numb, I pushed out into the blinding summer sun. I hadn’t intended to pay for him, but somehow I had.