IN THE MORNING, Mathilde went whirring off on an eighty-mile bike ride. Lancelot undressed and looked at himself in the mirror. Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life. Now, though, the wrinkles in the skin of his scrotum, the swirl of gray in the chest hair, the fetal neck wattle. One chink in the armor and death seeps in. He turned this way and that until he found the angle that made him look the way he’d been before his impromptu flight down the stairs in the spring.