Ira Levinson, at 91, is preparing to die within months from lung cancer when his pickup skids off the road, stranding him trapped and bleeding. Alone and afraid, he conjures the specter of his dead wife to console himself with her company and uses these last few hours to look back on his long life and the love he found with Ruth: “A man should die as he had lived […] surrounded and comforted by those he’s always loved” (237). His memories are of a fairy tale romance disrupted by the couple’s struggles with their childlessness. The touching letters he writes every year on their anniversary, even after Ruth is gone, testify to his unflagging romantic spirit. As Ira weakens in the car, he imagines Ruth bolstering him with the cliché that love is eternal and that his fast-approaching death will reunite him with her. 

Ira and Ruth’s art collection functions as the novel’s great MacGuffin—a world class set of paintings worth millions that the couple amassed over the course of their lives. Collecting art connected Ruth to her family’s past as part of the Austrian intellectual elite; but Ira, a relatively uneducated shopkeeper, cares more about Ruth’s appreciation for the art than its cultural status.