She trailed her fingers along his closed Yamaha grand (he had bought it the day after he watched Laurence Olivier’s deathbed scene in Brideshead Revisited: “What am I waiting for? If not now, when?”). She sat down at his desk and stroked the cool flanks of the brass elephant, perusing the day’s junk mail she had placed on Rudy’s desk earlier, an indulgence she continued to allow herself (along with his recorded telephone message, which she could not bring herself to erase). Today’s mail that had not needed to be forwarded to Rudy’s executor had included a letter from Verizon, with its priceless boast in red on the envelope: WE HAVE PULLED OUT ALL THE STOPS TO GET YOU TO COME BACK! Christina gave an appreciative snort and slid the envelope beneath Rudy’s Seiko watch, still on Daylight Saving Time from last April, and admired her arrangement. The composition of the two objects gave her a visceral satisfaction, perhaps akin to that experienced by her grave-neighbor-to-be, Gertrude von Kohler Spezzi, when she had scooped out another inch of belly from a stone torso.
