And Harrison, it turned out, played too, and one afternoon he invited me to sit, and I did, and we began a game that would, in a sense, continue for the next two years.

We became inseparable with a speed that surprised us both.

We spent countless hours under that old oak tree, playing chess, and drinking the imported tea Harrison somehow always had on hand, and listening to jazz records on a little portable player, and talking, as old people talk, about our deepest regrets.

He was a widower, he told me.

He had three grown children, and yet, he confessed, his lavish suite was painfully, echoingly empty.

“They don’t care about me,” he said to me one afternoon, quietly, moving a bishop across the board without really looking at it.

“They’re just waiting for me to die.” I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and I made my move, and I let the silence hold his grief for a moment.

I did not know, then, how much more there was beneath it.

I thought I had simply found, late in life, an unlikely friend, a wealthy old man who was, underneath the cashmere, as lonely as I was.

That was true.

It was only a small fraction of the truth.

But I want to dwell on the part that was true, the loneliness, because it was real and it was the ground on which everything else was built, and it explains why an old woman and an old man from opposite ends of the earth found each other so easily across a chessboard.

Loneliness, I have learned, is the great equalizer of old age.

It does not care how much money you have.