“Captain, ground control is requesting our pushback clearance.

We’re losing our departure slot.” And Luca stood there, utterly paralyzed, caught between the proposal he had just broadcast to first class, the wife standing in front of him with her son’s drawing in the story on her lips, and a plane full of two hundred passengers waiting to fly.

I have thought since that this was the truest picture of the man I ever got: Luca frozen in a galley, unable to move, because every direction he could turn led to a catastrophe of his own making.

He had wanted, I think, to have everything at once — the wife and the mistress, the family and the fantasy, the applause and the home — and he had constructed an elaborate arrangement to keep all of it, and in that galley the whole thing collapsed into a single impossible instant, and he simply stopped, like a machine given contradictory commands.