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All of this, I should say, initially made me intensely suspicious; they seemed too perfect, too open, pure, generous; how could they be involved with generations of authors—the offensive, the quick to take offense, the batshit crazy—without making a single enemy, unless they were secretly bland or intellectually inert or there were bodies decaying under the floorboards? The first time I was in their house I moved gingerly not only because I felt I was in a museum, terrified of breaking something, but also because I feared a trap.

As I reread Natali's message, I scrolled through memories of my first evenings in their house as my teenage years came to an end: spilling wine on hardwood and upholstery, Bernard and Natali patiently listening to my younger self as I affected literary seriousness, my speech no doubt a patchwork of interpretive clichés and errors of fact, their telling stories the import of which would often only occur to me years later. I remembered debating and/or flirting with other students and hangers-on, other young writers from whom I was desperate to distinguish myself, getting no help in that regard from either Bernard or Natali, since they treated everyone equally, infuriating me. But the memory that returned to me most vividly as I stood on East Seventy-ninth Street was of meeting their daughter, a young woman with whom I was for a time obsessed, and of whom I still occasionally think, despite having met her only once.

A distinguished South African writer had come that night to campus to read from his new novel, so I encountered the daughter at what was an unusually crowded gathering. It was perhaps the second or third time I'd been in the house, which meant I was still nervous, skeptical. I was standing in the dining room where food and wine and glasses had been laid out on the table, admiring a collage of Bernard's on the wall, when a woman—older than I was then, younger than I am now—identified the source of one of the collage's elements from behind me: a sliver of a movie poster for Murnau's
Sunrise
. I turned to face her and was, as they say, stunned—large gray-blue eyes, a full mouth, long and jet-black hair with a few strands of silver in it, and an immediately apparent poise and intelligence for which no catalog of features could account. Realizing that I was just staring at her, it finally occurred to me to speak, and I managed to say something about the rightness of fit between silent film and collage, mute media that depend on splicing for effect. Whatever its merit, she acted as though I'd contributed something intelligent, and electricity branched through me with her smile. I asked her if she was often at Bernard's and Natali's and she said, laughing, “I grew up here,” and then I understood—her knowledge of the collage, her aura of brilliance, her obvious comfort in this hallowed space—that this gorgeous woman was their daughter.

We shook hands and said our names, but I was too overwhelmed by contact with the former to catch the latter, and before I could ask her to repeat it, she was taken away from me by a man, a distinguished professor of something, who wanted to introduce her to the distinguished writer. For the rest of the evening I milled around the reception waiting for an opportunity to insinuate myself back into her company, but somehow it never came, or I never had the nerve to act. Every time I heard her laugh or succeeded in picking out her voice from the general din or saw her move gracefully through a room, my whole body started, then I felt as if I were falling, a sensation akin to the myoclonic twitch that, just as you are drifting off to sleep, wakes you violently; standing there among the first editions, I was convinced it was the shudder of fate.

I found myself before the glass cases of curios and sculptures that lined one of the dining room walls and discovered that there was a small line drawing of the daughter in a silver frame, vaguely reminiscent of Modigliani in its elongation; I wondered if Bernard had composed the little unsigned portrait. By this point I'd outlasted most of the crowd. The wine gave me the courage to have another glass of wine, which in turn gave me the courage to take one of the now-available chairs in the living room and to listen along with the others to Bernard. He was telling the story, pausing every few minutes to stir the fire he was sitting beside, of a French author who, hard up for money, had fabricated letters to himself from famous interlocutors, then attempted to sell them to a university library. I glanced at Bernard's daughter furtively; in the firelight, she was dusky gold.

I did not say another word to her that evening. She would not, it appeared, be sleeping at the house. Soon after Bernard had finished his story—the forger was caught, but then published the letters as an epistolary novel to critical acclaim—the professor yawned to indicate his imminent departure and the daughter asked if she could have a ride. When they stood, everyone else in the living room stood, and I was fortunate enough to receive a kiss on my cheek from her, after she had kissed Bernard and Natali and one or two others goodbye. She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world's possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she'd brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.

I spent the next few months going to every reception and looking for the daughter, never having the guts to ask after her directly, or, that first year, to say much of anything to Bernard and Natali, although in their presence I was growing incrementally more relaxed, and whom now, more than ever, I wanted to impress. She would often appear in my dreams, at least one of which resulted in nocturnal emission, the last time I would experience that phenomenon, although most of them were chaste, clichéd—exploring Paris hand in hand, etc. She became a present absence, the phantom I measured the actual against while taking bong hits with my roommate; I thought I saw her in passing cars, disappearing around corners, walking down a jetway at the airport when I was heading home for winter break.

Finally I asked Bernard her name, her whereabouts, probably betraying desperation, at which point he gave me a quizzical look and explained: I have no daughter. I felt the world rearrange itself around me, that there had been a death. But the woman I had met with the distinguished professor, the one who said she'd grown up in the house, the one in the drawing, etc.? He had trouble recalling whom I meant. She must have intended “grown up here” in some other sense; perhaps, it occurred to me, she meant it was the place where she'd absorbed her education. He asked me to bring him the drawing and when he saw it he explained he'd found it at a garage sale in Michigan; tears, at least in my memory, started in my eyes.

Fifteen years had elapsed between my learning they were childless—of course they were childless; the house had no traces of a nuclear family's present or past—and my reading the message from Natali about Bernard's fall. Now, as I called Natali's cell phone, I again saw their daughter's face, felt the echo of desire, wanted to call her and talk about Bernard. In those fifteen years, I'd published Natali's and Bernard's work in magazines I'd edited, written essays about them, visited them frequently. Only recently had I come to Providence—at Natali's request—and been asked to become their literary executor, a great honor and responsibility, a proposal to which, after reminding them in a long and wine-soaked speech about my myriad insufficiencies, and noting my diagnosis, I agreed.

Natali picked up the phone, although “picked up” is an anachronistic phrase; she sounded the same as ever. I asked what I could do. The answer was basically nothing, though I was welcome to visit as soon as tomorrow morning. Perhaps I could bring some poems, as she was reading a little to Bernard when he wasn't sleeping.

I took the 5 train back to Brooklyn, undercooked and ate spaghetti, and then started to pace my apartment, trying to decide what poetry to bring. Four hours later it looked as though my apartment had been ransacked or had endured a seismic event. I'd pulled dozens of books from the unfinished pine shelves, stirring up dust, and then discarded them in piles on the floor, either because the book in question was a gift from Bernard or Natali, or a book they had published, or a book they'd written, and so it seemed a failure of imagination to select it, or because I knew or feared it was a poet they didn't like, or because the poems were too elegiac, or too long to be read to Bernard in his condition. I was growing increasingly desperate, my worry about Bernard now compounded by the ridiculous worry that bringing the wrong book would somehow invalidate their trust in me as their executor, expose me as unworthy. Added to that was the shame I began to feel when I realized that, if I were in Bernard's position, I wouldn't even think about literature, would just be asking for morphine and distracting myself, if possible, with reality TV, a line of thought that then led me to imagine recovering, or failing to recover, from open-heart surgery.

I lay on the floor and watched the slow rotation of the ceiling fan and found it a little difficult to breathe as all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable—I couldn't find, in my apartment full of books, a single page of it to bring to the same hospital where they'd measured my limbs and, depending on insurance, might inseminate my friend.

Then out of nowhere, as if descending from the ceiling, the right poet came to me: William Bronk. I remembered how Bernard had told me he'd met Bronk just once, and neither had said much; they'd had lunch or coffee in congenial if mildly awkward silence. Bernard believed Bronk was one of the great and underappreciated poets of the second half of the twentieth century. A decade later, after Bronk's death, Bernard had told me, he met a graduate student who had been a distant relation or family friend of Bronk's and had gotten to know the poet in his later years. The graduate student was always talking about Bronk as if Bernard and Bronk were dear friends, as if they'd known each other since childhood, which Bernard found a little puzzling. After the fifth or sixth conversation in which the student tried to reminisce with Bernard about Bronk, about the kind of man he was, Bernard felt it necessary to explain to the student that, while he admired the poetry tremendously, he'd only met Bronk once, and briefly, that he had no sense of him as a person. The student was shocked: But he always spoke about you, he said to Bernard, about how you'd sought him out, about how well you got along, the understanding between you, etc. One of the main reasons I came here to study with you was because of your relationship. I imagine Bernard saw the world rearrange itself around the student.

Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraced Stevens's lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk's poetry was suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I'd read all his books out of a sense of duty, but I was usually bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity. But now, when I found Bronk's selected poems on one of the shelves and opened the book at random, the power of it was all finally there, finally real for me:

MIDSUMMER

A green world, a scene of green deep

with light blues, the greens made deep

by those blues. One thinks how

in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen

(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene

sitter's face, the serene pose, as though

in some impossible mirror, face to back,

human serenity gazed at a green world

which gazed at this face.

                                      And see now,

here is that place, those greens

are here, deep with those blues. The air

we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though

with berries. We are here. We are here.

Set this down too, as much

as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.

The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

This was what I brought to the hospital the next morning, along with some quinoa salad and dried mangoes for Natali. I just caught the elevator as the doors closed, and hit the button for the seventh floor, but the number didn't light up. Still, the elevator started to ascend, stopping on every floor. I was the only one in the elevator and its erratic behavior was making me nervous, so I got out on the fourth floor and walked. Later I would learn that this was a Sabbath elevator—an elevator that operates automatically in order to circumvent the Jewish law requiring observers to abstain from operating electric switches on Shabbat.

Bernard looked tiny in the hospital bed, his neck in a brace, but he also seemed like himself; the first thing he said to me, his voice raspy because of damage to his larynx, was that he was sorry he hadn't had a chance to read my novel, but he'd been detained. It smelled like a hospital room smells, like sanitizer and urine, but it was otherwise okay. A paper curtain offered privacy to or from the other patient in the room, who must have been asleep.