byFantocinni, in his forty-fourth year, learned all there was to know about pain. Until then his luck had always been unfailingly good, and the worst of times had not been unhappy. There had been only success and pleasure, progress and fulfillment. And then, uncannily, the antithesis of all that eclipsed his happiness. His beautiful wife, having collapsed in Saks while pricing Gucci scarves, arrived too late in the hospital emergency room and drew her final breath on a gurney there, the last words she heard those of a fabulous one-liner by Rodney Dangerfield that filtered in from the TV set in the adjacent waiting room where a small nervous group sat watching the Mery Griffin Show. His lovely daughter, a talented novelist, was found hanging by a typewriter ribbon from a light fixture in he
