Tonight, because all matter crumbles, your father sits drunker than usual in the red armchair. His back is to the window, level with the yellow sheen of the street lamp that falls on his left shoulder and down across his chest. From the other side of the living room, he is an icon in a white undershirt. Now he applies his concentration to balancing the highball on the armrest. Successful, he looks up exalted and tells you how you must carry the tables and chairs, the beds and bookcases, everything you own out into the yard and burn it....

I called Michael and he told me he just got home from a wake. “Oh, I am sorry,” I said. “No, no,” he said, “it was the best wake I have ever been to. The funeral home was as warm and as cozy as anyone’s living room. We had the greatest time. My friend looked wonderful, much better dead than alive. He wore his red and green Hawaiian shirt. He was the most handsome corpse I’d ever seen. They did such a good job! His daughter was there and a lot of old friends I had not seen in years....

There is a room of the past and a room of the cosmos. A room of chandeliers and a room of peonies dropping their pink beauty onto the old table. There is a house with walls of weathered clapboard and paths that lead both to the ocean and to the mountains and at dusk to the anonymous blue airspaces of the city. There are high double-hung windows and doors with etched glass behind which the rooms are lit like yellow leaves in the night. Everything is true inside the house as well as outside the house—where at this moment...