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That Jonas and I should cross paths was inevitable; we belonged to the same world Our first reunion occurred at a conference in Toronto in 2002 Enough tied toof the relationship We were all "how the hell are you" and "you haven’t changed a bit" and vowed to keep in better touch, as if we’d been in touch at all He had returned to Harvard, of course--it ran in the fae of soh he was secretive about this, and I didn’t press Of Liz, he offered only the bare-bones professional data She was teaching at Boston College; she liked it, her students worshipped her, she orking on a book I told hi year, I received a Christraph cards that people use to parade their beautiful children, though the ie showed only the two of them The shot had been taken in some arid locale; they were dressed head to foot in khaki and wearing honest-to-God pith helmets A note from Liz ritten on the back, penned in a hurried script, as if added at the last second: Jonas said he ran into you Glad you’re doing well!

Year by year, the cards kept co: atop elephants in India, posing before the Great Wall of China, standing at the bow of a ship in heavy parkas with a glacial coastline in the background All very cheery, yet there was so about these photos, a ! Really! Swear to God! I began to notice other things Jonas was the sa precipitously, and not just physically In previous pictures, her eyes had been distracted in a manner that made the photo seem incidental to the e made to pose with a newspaper Her s this? Furtheraze was a e raph, taken in the desert, Lear was standing behind her, wrapping her with his arms Year by year, they separated The last one I received, in 2010, had been taken at a café beside a river that was un across from each other, far out of arm’s reach Glasses of wine stood on the table My old roommate’s was nearly empty Liz had touched hers not at all

At the saan to swirl about Jonas I had always known him to be a man of ardent if somewhat outlandish passions, but the stories I heard were disturbing Jonas Lear, it was said, had gone off the deep end His research had drifted into fantasy His last paper, published in Nature, had danced around the subject, but people had begun to use the V-word in connection to hi since, or appeared at the usual conferences, where a good deal of barrooues even went so far as to conjecture that his tenure was in jeopardy A certain amount of schadenfreude was built into our profession, the theory being that one enuinely worried for hi after Julianna tossed in the towel on our ersatz e that I received a call from a man named Paul Kiernan I had ist at Harvard, a junior colleague of Jonas’s, with an excellent reputation I could tell that the conversationassociation; the gist of his call was his concern that his tenure case ht I write a letter on his behalf? My initial instinct was to tell hiossip be das of tenure committees, I knew he had a point

"A lot of it has to do with his wife, actually," Paul said "You’ve got to feel for the guy"

I practically dropped the phone "What are you talking about?"

"I’ood friends and all She’s very sick, it doesn’t look good I guess I shouldn’t have said anything"

"I’ll write your letter," I said, and hung up

I was coe and began to dial, then put the phone back in its cradle What would I say, after so ht did I have at this late date to reinserther, not for a second, but she was another man’s wife At a time like this, their bond was para from my parents, it was that the journey of death was one that spouses took together Maybe it was just the old cowardice returning, but I did not pick up the phone again