COPPER BROUGHT THE NEWS. The words tunneled through bundles of telephone cable buried underground, then leapt softly across the city on arcs of telephone wire. The syllables entered a third-floor apartment and there, with the strength of a whisper, ended in the receiver Bianca held to her ear. I’m sorry, repeated a woman’s voice. So, so sorry.

Bianca felt calm when the gendarmes arrived to escort her to her husband. During the labyrinthine drive, she watched the cars jockey for open patches of slick pavement. She watched the windshield wipers sweep across the whole scene, almost tireless in their duty were it not for a hint of rubbery complaint. She did not panic. David would be nursing a sprained leg, or a broken arm, perhaps just a bandaged contusion from his accident. The car pulled up at the rear of a gray building. From the outside, the building was unassuming, inside it was hushed, almost pretending not to exist. She realized they were at the morgue. As she followed the gendarmes down the corridor she felt the urge to laugh. Where was she at this moment, really? Sleeping, of course. Was it the middle of the night now as she dreamt, or was she drugged within the unknown boundaries of an overly-long afternoon nap? She could be in a park, in the rented apartment, maybe even on a bench along the river. It was disconcerting, this sense of not knowing where she actually, actually was. Instead of napping, she should be shopping, or waiting to pay the bill at a cafe. La note, s’il vous plâit. Or, since she was on the subject of this dream, she should be having flamboyant fantasies instead of finding herself issuing bone-real complaints. She was certainly not here, so many turns and doorways later, staring at her husband’s body, laid out as though asleep on the brushed steel countertop that matched the one in their kitchen back home. David. Wake up, she said to herself. Let’s end this scene with a cliché.

He died immediately, someone said. The man who spoke appeared to be a doctor. Was he a doctor? she asked. Yes. Yes he was. Like the other men in the room, this doctor seemed both somber and bored. She wondered why there would be a doctor in a morgue. He could be lying. She tried to conjure up some dream extras, a clown, cats, Walter Cronkite. She wanted Walter to recite the lyrics to a Stevie Wonder tune, as he had a few dreams ago, in a reassuring, droll roll of words. Like a fool I went and stayed too long / Now I'm wondering if your love's still strong / Ooo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours. But Walter Cronkite was a no-show for this act. She glanced at the present company and wondered what was expected of her. She nodded at what they told her, but she wasn’t really listening. No one, it seemed, spoke English, or at least the kind of English Bianca could understand at this moment. Simple words, free from accents and talk of accidents. If this were real, she knew she wouldn’t be this calm. She would be desperate, crazed, collapsing with grief. That was a great consolation. Then the explanation came and poisoned everything. This is shock, a voice inside her explained. She recognized the voice. It was Walter Cronkite. Mr. Cronkite cleared his throat. He’d just read the information on a bulletin and now he had to tell her. He was duty-bound. He had no choice. Your husband is dead. What you’re feeling now is shock. The truth’ll hit you and then you’re going to lose it. But not just yet. I’ll keep you posted. That’s the way it is. The man who said he was a doctor rattled a half-filled orange vial, then pressed the container of pills into Bianca’s hand. He folded her fingers around the petite bottle. She had such difficulty grasping the container.

Back in the apartment she and David had rented, Bianca tried to rid the rooms of the darkness. But no matter how many lights she turned on, and no matter the number of windows she unlatched and swung wide to the warm outside air, the darkness would not leave. Bianca felt the same numbness that had followed her from the morgue. She took three more of the small white pills to keep herself numb.

On the floor of the bedroom, David’s suitcase yawned open like a giant clam displaying a fabric muscle. David had been so busy over the past couple weeks that he hadn’t even bothered to move his clothes out of the suitcase. On top of the half-filled dresser sat pages from David’s project on Fryderyk Chopin, as well as a book of Chopin’s correspondence, various dog-eared journals on music theory and music history, and a small pocket-sized bust of the composer that David had been using as a paperweight since he’d begun writing the Chopin book last year. Bianca picked up the bust and ran her thumb over Chopin’s face. She placed it aside, took the book of Chopin’s collected letters, and sat down on the bed. David’s illegible notes were scrawled in the margins. Her eyes rested on a page where David had circled a line Chopin had written: You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. She closed the book.

Just a year earlier, David had been having an affair with one of his students. He’d even brought the girl over to their house during finals week. Afterward, there had been flimsy excuses on his part for having cheated, not mentioned specifically, but there. His stupidity, Bianca’s seven-year age over him, their failure at pregnancy. She had kicked David out of the house for a week before letting him return. He’d then taken a one-year sabbatical from the college, holed himself up at home in his office and wrote his book on Chopin. Now they were spending a month in Paris while he worked with a French translator. A publisher here with a reputation for putting out academic titles with low print runs had accepted a French translation, even though David hadn’t yet published the book on Chopin at home, in English. This was, at least for him, a working vacation. A tax write-off. A deduction.

Coming to Paris had marked an entire year since David’s cheating — affair was too gracious a word. On days when she forgot his infidelity, life seemed good again. And then there were the other days, even here in Paris, when the thought of the student raced to her mind as soon as she awoke. On those days, she wondered what David’s eyes saw in a waitress, or a woman following her dog down the street, or the college girls laughing their way back into Paris now at the end of summer. Bianca’s suspicious eyes became masculine, alert to the shadow of cleavage, high hemlines and tight skirts. On such a day, the smallest thing could bring up such hurt, like this line in a letter by Chopin. You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. Had David circled the line because of its happy coincidence to his own feelings with the student? Even after a year of repentance, of verbal I-love-yous, did he love her? Bianca loved her husband, still, but she trusted him less now. The sad fact was that one indiscretion flawed him so deeply, for life. And then, right then as she sat on the bed with the closed book of Chopin’s letters in her hand, it hit her. David. Dead.