As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.

When had she begun to suspect that her second-floor tenant, Mr. Han, was building a bomb? The idea had come to her slowly, the way she’d ­intuited her husband’s illness in its early days, ­before the lapses and the wandering and the loss of language made it clear to everyone. 

Funny thing to worry about. Little hairs. Hairs on back of sweater as she goes out of the room. Little hairs, how you look from the back, girls worry about this. Or they used to. Now girls are free. Okay to be unpretty, ungirls.

The week that began with Melania Trump’s memorable observation that a country should be judged by how it treats its citizens also began with an email from my mother’s sister, announcing that she and her husband were in Paris and would love to see me if I had time.

At the age of eighteen, my mother ­embarked on a movie career in her ­native city of Antwerp. Until then, she had worked for the gas company and taken some elocution courses, but when a studio was built on the Pyckestraat, at the initiative of a certain Jan Vanderheyden, she walked in the door and was hired.

I leaned forward from the couch and took the burning nub of joint from his outstretched hand. We called him Dub because his name was Lazarus Livingston—Double L.

An ad hoc group of ten longtime and tentative friends rents a house on the Spanish island of Formentera. 

This is the story (Berenice began) of one man, a “man’s man,” a professional valet and a good one.

Agnes left me five years ago. Today is Good Friday. I went to church and looked at the vestments. The one day of the year when I go to church.