But you know.”

In America it was five a.m. He wondered if anyone would be up watching.

And to all of it his reactions were: How strange to have a royal family. She was never a beauty. What did it all cost? Death by automobile is always slightly trivial. People applauded the hearse. What does one write in a condolence book? It’s really themselves they’re pitying. How will they feel in a month? In a year? We magnify everything to learn if we’re right. Someone—and this is what he wrote finally, the crux of it, the literature of the failed actuality—someone has to tell us what’s important, because we no longer know.

The next day he’d learned that his friend’s wife had died in Oxford. An aneurysm. Very sudden. Very brief and painless. Only, no one could send flowers. All the flowers were spoken for, which seemed to point everything up badly. “The English. We’ve learned something about ourselves, haven’t we, James?” his friend said bitterly as they sat in his car outside the Oxford station, waiting for other friends to arrive. For the other funeral. The real-er one.

“What is it?” Wales said.

“That we’re as stupid as the next bunch. As stupid as you are. That’s all new to us, you see. We’ve never exactly known that until now.”

Why that all came back to him he couldn’t say. Stories he wrote usually didn’t. Though later, it had been easy to write a lecture whose theme was “Failed Actuality: How We Discover the Meaning of the Things We See.” In it he’d retold the story of his friend’s wife’s death as a point of contrast. Which was when Jena had come into the picture, and they’d begun to hurry.

From the window, he watched onto the little wedge of public park between the hotel’s back entrance and the Drive, still solid with cars this late. Taxis cruised past, their yellow roof-lights signaling at liberty. A jogger in bright orange bounced alone along the concrete beach that curved up to Lincoln Park. A man with two Weimaraners had stopped to sprinkle breadcrumbs on the park benches. All expelled soundless breaths into the night.

Outside on the cold Avenue they walked to the restaurant she preferred. Not far—Walton Street. She liked going to one place over and over until she tired of it and then would never go back. The wind was gusting.