CAROL MUSKE-DUKES was married to actor David Coleman Dukes until his sudden death - a situation eerily foreshadowed in her novel Life After Death. A year later, she ponders the unlit intersection where art and life converge.

I sat down to wait in the sunny lobby of the hotel where the actor and I had arranged to meet. After a few minutes, I looked up as a tall, dark-haired man appeared in the doorway He'd rushed over from the set, he said -- and apologized for being late. He put out his hand as he approached. "By the way I'm David Dukes," he said, and I understood, as I took his hand and gazed into those blue eyes, how we know when our lives are changing before us, how we sense something -- a little ripple in time, a kind of swerving from the present into an imagined future. I knew he was going to happen to me -- it felt, suddenly like what the Italians call destino.

But I didn't really believe in fate -- that something beyond our power can determine our lives. It was true that I began to take mental notes, as writers do, on what I was experiencing. I noted the pale gold fresco light ("the color of Giotto's halos," I wrote shamelessly in a journal) pouring through the skylights. I noted the way David stood, his blue eyes, the sunglasses in his pocket. He took me to lunch on the rooftop of his hotel; he drove me from Florence to Perugia through the wineblue valleys to the castle of my friend's parents, where we fell in love. We carried on a cross-country romance when we returned to America. We married at City Hall in New York City and moved to Los Angeles when I was pregnant. I could tell the story as if life assumed a shape -- from the fairy-tale fantasy of our meeting onward. But I had no idea the shape my life would take being married to an actor. I knew nothing then of the uncertainty the many times David would be gone away working, the intensity of missing him, the difficulty and strain of separation. I only knew that I was headed toward a place from which I could not turn away.

Nineteen years after we met, on another sunny day -- October 9, 2000 -- I stood with our 17-year-old daughter; Annie, on the front steps of our home in Los Angeles waving goodbye to David, who was flying back to the set of a miniseries called Rose Red, shooting in Seattle/Tacoma. He had been home for the weekend, attending a father-daughter picnic at Annie's school and a prospective-student function at USC, where I am a professor. I was sorry to see him leave but was cheered thinking he'd be home in a few days for a three-week break. I was pleased, too, because I'd just finished making changes to the copyedited manuscript of my new novel, Life After Death. Annie and I continued to wave as the car sent to take David to the airport pulled away from the curb. I stood on the steps after Annie went back inside, waving till the car disappeared around the corner. Then I packed up my novel, sealing it in the return envelope to the publisher-and drove to the FedEx drop-off box. On the way I thought about the book, how making the last copy changes represented a huge milestone. The novel had gone through many versions. David, with his actor's infallible ear for dialogue and diction, had read every revision over the years except this one. He'd asked to take a copy with him on the plane, then decided to wait to read it till he got back. I was eager to have his opinion of this final version of my unconventional novel about life and death, about (among other things) a woman whose husband dies of a heart attack on a tennis court.

A few hours later, around seven that night, the phone rang. The young man at the other end of the line identified himself as a tennis pro at a recreation center in Spanaway Washington. This is where my husband went after his afternoon flight -- for an early evening tennis workout. And this is where (as the agitated young voice was now telling me) he had dropped dead of a heart attack on the tennis court.

The phone rings and your life changes in an eye blink; you reject everything connected to the imposition of this new unreality a world in which someone you love deeply no longer exists. You think that what is happening cannot be happening, that a terrible mistake has been made. I talked to the doctor; who was sobbing, in the emergency room near the tennis court where David was taken. I talked to a cold and insensitive representative of the Pierce County Medical Examiner's Office. I tried to explain to Annie what had happened, but I could not grasp that he was gone. Hadn't he just kissed us goodbye? Hadn't he stood in the bedroom, in the sunlight, holding the proofs of Annie's senior class photos, his eyes brimming because his daughter was growing up, because (as he said then) she looked a little like his mother; who'd passed away just a few years earlier?

The decision did not stop me from going over and over in my mind this apparent convergence of art and life. How could I have written into existence the exact same fate for a character who was almost nothing like my husband except that he played tennis and was dramatic and handsome? I know that startling prefigurings are not unknown in literature. Many years before Hitler, Franz Kafka seemed to predict the Holocaust in his writings. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes imagined the death of a son in a novel -- and his own son met a similar fate. But I do not believe this means that writers have a sixth sense, that writers are prescient; rather; I think they are so attuned to, so sensitive to, the present moment that what they do may appear to be a gift of divination.