American Realism

The dinner was to be at Galina’s apartment, in the East 70s. She had been watching a lot of Visconti and wanted to re-create the salons and dinners of The Innocent, Ludwig, and Death in Venice.

For approximately a decade, her husband, Igor, had been dying from a series of treatable cancers in nonessential tissues. “Dying is so boring after a while,” he said. In the spring, his doctors had told them that nothing more could be done and the time had come to transition to hospice care. Galina...