His Wife Leaves Him

~ ~ ~

Then there was the time — he might even have put it in one of his fictions — when he and Gwen and the kids and his in-laws were walking on the south side of 72nd Street toward Broadway. He was carrying Maureen, so she must have been one or two. Gwen was pushing Rosalind in the stroller. If Maureen wanted to be in the stroller, or he got tired carrying her, then Rosalind would have to walk. They’d just had an early dinner at a Jewish restaurant-deli a little ways up the street. Moscowitz and Lupkowitz, he thinks it was called. No, that was the restaurant-deli his father used to speak about going to, on the Lower East Side, he thinks. He knows Moscowitz was the first name but he’s not sure if Lupkowitz was the second. Fine and Shapiro. That’s what the name of the restaurant they went to was. Had been in the same location for about forty years, and for all he knows, is still there. “They bought the building they’re in,” his father-in-law once told him, “which means they’ll never have to go out of business because of the landlord tripling the rent.” When a car pulled up and double-parked in front of a grocery they were passing. Two men jumped out, the driver stayed, and ran into the store. It was owned by Koreans. They sold mostly produce. Before he moved to Baltimore, he bought some fruit and vegetables there a few times. They were more expensive than the Korean grocery on Columbus and 73rd, but both stores had some of the best produce in the neighborhood and were convenient because they were so small. The store was completely open to the street, its glass front folding all the way in to both sides. In winter, thick plastic sheets covered the outside of the store. One man had a gun — maybe the other did too, but wasn’t showing his — and said something to a Korean man sitting on a milk crate, who’d been taking green peppers out of a cardboard box and arranging them on a display stand. The Korean man went to the cash register, opened it and began filling a brown paper bag with cash. “Robbery,” Gwen’s father had already said. “Let’s get out of here,” and pulled the stroller with one hand and grabbed his wife by the arm with the other, and said “Martin; quick what’re you looking at? Come with us,” and they all walked quickly toward Broadway, Gwen pushing the stroller. “Wait a minute,” he said to Gwen. “They can’t do this on the street, in broad daylight.” He handed Maureen to her and started back. “Martin; don’t,” she said. He didn’t know how far he’d go or what he was going to do, but he’d at least get the license-plate number. The rear plate was covered with mud, or something brown — even the state it was from, and he didn’t want to go around to the front because the driver would see him. A Korean woman was filling a second paper bag with money from a metal box under the cash register. The gunman was making motions with his hand for the woman and man to go faster. Nobody else on the street seemed to notice what was going on. They walked past without looking at the store, or if they did look, didn’t think anything was unusual. The gun was now hidden by the man’s leg. His father-in-law grabbed his shoulder. “Are you crazy? It’s not your business. You’re a family man now; with responsibilities. I know all about your past heroics, but this time you’ll get us both killed.” Gwen and the rest were at the corner. His mother-in-law was waving frantically for them to come. Just then the two men walked out of the store to the car, the gunman carrying a plastic shopping bag, and they drove off. The Korean man ran to the sidewalk and screamed “Police. Please, police, police.” “Don’t even say you’ll be a witness,” his father-in-law said. “They’ll never catch the thieves. And if they do, you’ll have to come back to New York at your own expense and identify them and later testify against them, and that could take days out of your time. Your place is with your wife and children and job. Let’s get home. Do you have the doggy bag?” and he said “It’s hanging on the back of the stroller.” They went to the corner. “This the newsstand where you once stopped a robbery?” his father-in-law said, and he said “They just wanted to steal a few magazines, and I sided with the newsstand owner.” “You got a cracked head from it, no?” and he said “The city’s Board of Estimate gave me a Good Samaritan citation, which meant the city reimbursed me for all my medical expenses.” Gwen handed him Maureen and said “What were you thinking?” and he said “I’m not sure. To yell at the robbers and then get out of the way.” “I don’t know what you’re going to think of me for saying this, but I can guess what my father told you and I agree with him a hundred percent.” His mother-in-law said “Grisha just told me what you wanted to do, Martin. You’re very brave and normally quite smart, but you can also be incredibly foolish. You have to think of the consequences more.” “Okay, okay,” he said, “I’ve been outnumbered. You kids have anything to say about it?” and Maureen rested her head on his shoulder and Rosalind said “About what, Daddy?” There was a commotion now in front of the grocery. A police or ambulance siren could be heard getting closer. Maybe it was for this. “Come,” his father-in-law said, “before we get in even more trouble,” and they waited for the light and crossed Broadway and went to his in-laws’ apartment.

They were in the car going to New York for a long weekend. While they were crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge he said to Gwen “I have to make a quick decision. Should we take 295, which is right off the bridge, to the Jersey Turnpike, or get on the turnpike about a mile from here? We’ve never gone that way before, and judging by the map I looked at yesterday, it doesn’t seem any longer. And there might be better scenery on it than the Turnpike, and, if we want to stop, a better place to eat.” “Anything you want,” she said. “We can pick up the Turnpike around Fort Dix, the map said — we’ll see signs for it. This’ll also break up the monotony of the hundred-plus miles of the Turnpike,” and she said “Fine.” Half an hour later the kids said they were hungry and had to make. He said “Nothing so far on this road, after the public rest area when we first got on it, so maybe there’s nothing any farther.” And to Gwen: “Think we should get off and look around?” and she said “If that’s what you think. You decide.” “Okay, we’ll get off at the next exit. They come quick enough. Maybe taking 295 wasn’t a good idea, and it’s only a bit more interesting than the Turnpike. I don’t know what I was expecting. I didn’t take it to save on the toll, I want you to understand,” and she said “It never entered my mind.” They got off, there were no signs for the Turnpike, saw a diner soon after—“Looks all right from the outside,” he said — and parked in front of it. “Going to come in?” he said to her, and she said “I’m not hungry.” “Don’t have to use the restroom?” and she said “No.” “I can bring you back something,” and she said “I said I’m not hungry.” “French fries? Ice cream? Something to drink?” and she said “Thanks, but will you stop?” “You didn’t say you weren’t thirsty, but okay, I won’t nudzh you anymore.” The kids and he went inside, used the restrooms, sat at the counter. The place was neat and clean but smelled of cigarette smoke. There were a few other customers, at the counter and three at a table, and most were smoking. No one was behind the counter. In fact, nobody working at the diner seemed to be around. There was an ashtray on the shelf behind the counter with lots of butts in it. “Maybe we’ll just get something to go,” he said to the kids. “I don’t like it here,” Rosalind said. “It’s too smoky.” “Neither do I,” he said. “All right, we’ll find another diner. Or we’ll just wait till we get on the Turnpike and go to one of those big rest areas we know there,” and they left. On the way back to the car he saw Gwen looking at him through her open window. Her expression was pretty blank. He smiled and waved to her but she didn’t smile or wave back. Just stared at him. Why does he bring all this up? Because she was acting in a way he’d never seen before. That true? Well, it was very unusual and it stands out. The kids got in the car — he thinks it was the first minivan they had, the one that gave them so much trouble — and he went up to her window and said “You’re not smiling or waving at me anymore?” She said “Why would you think that?” and faked a smile and flapped her hand at him. “That’s not a real smile,” and she said “So? That’s what I’m like. I can’t put one on.” “You unhappy?” and she said “I don’t want to talk about it.” “You don’t love me anymore?” he said, smiling, because he was kidding, and she said “Don’t be an idiot. I was thinking about something else, not you or the kids or my parents. That’s why I didn’t smile or wave, but must I explain?” and he said “Not if you don’t want to,” and she said “Good,” and turned to the windshield and stared at it. He got in beside her, slapped her left thigh gently, wanted to rub it as he often did in the car, even when he was driving, but knew she wouldn’t want him to, and started the car. “You know, your not smiling at me is taking away one of the great pleasures of my life, and even your waving back to me with a real wave gives me a big kick,” and she said “Oh, knock it off.” “God, you’re in a pissy mood,” and she said “I told you. It’s not about you, but it’s becoming you. Why can’t you accept that?” “Now I definitely won’t ask you what it is,” and she said “Don’t,” and he said “Jesus,” and she said “Too bad.” “What’s wrong daddy?” Rosalind said. “Why aren’t we driving?” “It’s nothing, sweetheart. Everything’s fine, and we’ll find another place to eat at soon. Now, which way should I go? Dumb of me not to have asked inside, but I just wanted to get out of there. Probably, right. That’s where the Turnpike should be or the signs to it,” and he drove.

He never told her this. Thought to, then thought how she would have taken it. She would have got very angry. Screamed terrible things at him. Or maybe not. Not like her, the screaming, though there were times. She would have said “Who gave you the right to do that? And for what? Some stupid sex?” That is, if he had also told her why he did it. Since she would have asked, he probably would have. He would have said “I didn’t want him in the room while we were making love, or scratching at our bedroom door to be let in. Plain and simple, I didn’t want to be interrupted.” She would have said “After what you just told me, I don’t know if I can ever trust what you say again. What a despicable thing to do. And look what it cost us. Between the two vets and medications, more than a thousand. If you had done the right thing — let him in when he wanted to — all of that would have been avoided. You knew there were foxes out there at night. We’ve seen them a few times during the day. But it’s night, under cover, when they’re mostly hunting, and squirrels and mice and cats are what they like to attack and eat the most. Poor Sleek. What he went through. He lay around the house for two days, not eating or drinking or doing anything but crawling to the litter box and usually missing, till you took him to the vet here. I wanted you to take him right away, not that it would have helped him with that vet, but you said that cats have a way of healing themselves. Since when had you become the expert? The first set of antibiotics weren’t working. The vet had no doubt given him the wrong one. But you said to give them time, and I like a fool agreed. It was only after he continued to get worse, or just didn’t improve, that you did the right thing: before we left for Maine you made an appointment with the Blue Hill vet for the afternoon we arrived. They saved his life. And now you tell me you’ve this confession to make, something you never told me and wanted to get off your chest — that Sleek didn’t get attacked the morning you let him out, but the evening before, when he wanted to come in. From now on, when I say, as I probably did that night, ‘Is Sleek in?’ don’t lie to me that he is. I’m so upset. Part of me wishes you hadn’t told me. Some things are better left a lie. But tell me, did you learn from your mistake? Have you kept him out some nights since then? If you have”—he had, once, and after they’d made love he’d planned to let him in but fell asleep and didn’t wake up till around four in the morning, when he whispered to her he was getting a glass of water and went to the kitchen to open the door for Sleek—“You’ll probably lie to me that you haven’t, so what’s the sense of asking the question?” “I haven’t,” he would have said. “Not even for an hour. I realized my mistake and was glad we were able to save Sleek, and I regret what I put him through and also the distress I caused you. I’ll never do anything like that again. You have my word, for whatever you think it’s worth. If, some nights, I don’t want him in our room or scratching at the door to be let in, I’ll put him on the porch, leave some water for him there and maybe his litter box, though he’s good at holding it in, and shut the porch door. That is, if it’s all right with you. And then let him out when I get up or if he starts whining or crying before, or if you want me to. But I really don’t mind him sleeping on our bed when we’re just sleeping. I actually like it, except when he tries to squeeze his way in between us or gets under the covers. But don’t I get some credit for finally telling the truth? It wasn’t easy, you know. I had a good idea how you’d react and what you’d say.” “No, no credit,” she would have said. “It’s not going to go away as easily as that.” So he never told her. What use would it have been? Getting it off his chest? He never put much stock in that, and the consequences from it all would have been too great.

Just about every time they were at her parents’ apartment after one or two in the afternoon or at night, but not when they only came to say goodbye before they drove to Baltimore, her father would say “Like me to make you a Bloody Mary, Martin?” If it was five or six or later, he almost always said “Sure, I’d love one; thanks. But please not too strong.” If it was earlier, he’d say “Much as I like your Bloody Marys, it’s a bit early for me to drink, but thanks.” “I make it with V8 juice,” her father would often say. “And no Tabasco pepper sauce in it for you. I know you don’t like hot foods, and I won’t make it too strong.” “Still too early for me. You have one,” and her father would usually say something like “I’ll wait till later, when I have my one drink for the night. But you, you’re a young man, and can take one now and one later.” Gwen would sometimes say “A little drink won’t hurt you,” and he’d say “Sweetheart, you know I don’t like anything alcoholic to drink till around six or seven. Not even a glass of wine if we’re having lunch at a restaurant. Though I will make an exception for one of your father’s Bloody Marys after five.” “Be a good husband and listen to your wife,” her father would say. “She knows I make a good drink.” “Grisha,” her mother said a couple of times, “if he doesn’t want one, don’t force him. He knows what he’s doing.” “Who’s forcing him? I know what I’m doing too. Stay out of it,” and she said something like “Grisha, please don’t talk that way. You’re with the children. It doesn’t sound nice.” “Okay,” he’d say, “but a short one. And half the vodka you put in your evening Bloody Marys.” “Not half; that’s not a drink,” and he’d say “Half,” and her father would smile impishly and say “Good, I’ve got a customer. One Bloody Mary coming up. Gwendolyn, can I get you anything?” and she’d say “Nothing, Poppa.” “I can open an excellent bottle of red wine a client gave me. He’s a wine expert. Said it was top-notch. I don’t drink it and your mother never touches a drop.” “It’ll go to waste if you only open it for me,” and her father would say “It won’t go to waste. Maybe you’ll have two glasses. And then you’ll take whatever’s left home with you. I’ll recork it real tight.” “All right, then, but like Martin’s, a small one. I’ll open the bottle for you,” and her father would say “Let me do it all myself. It’s a great pleasure for your mother and me to see you here and you both so happy,” and if the kids were with them, “and my darling grandchildren so pretty and healthy.” Because of a problem her father had with both ankles for years, he’d shuffle instead of walk, his feet, in orthopedic boots he only wore at home, barely lifting off the floor. Still, he insisted on getting the drinks himself. “Sit; sit; it’s good exercise for me. I haven’t been on my feet all day.” Smiling, he’d shuffle to the kitchen, and a few minutes later, shuffle back to the living room holding a small tray in both hands with the Bloody Mary on it. “No; again, it’s good exercise for me. Let me get the wine too.” Then he’d sit and say “So how is it, Martin? The wine I know is very good.” “A little strong, but a terrific drink. As I said, you make a great Blood Mary. And I’m not just saying that. You know I was a bartender before I met Gwen, and yours is vastly superior to the ones I used to make, and I had the best ingredients to work with.” “It’s the V8 juice. Much better than regular tomato. And no Tabasco sauce. A few drops would have made it even better, but you didn’t want. And I know you don’t like salt — with my ankles, I shouldn’t either — but I sprinkled a little in out of habit. Gwen, your wine? What I gave you couldn’t have been enough,” and she’d say “It was plenty. Your client certainly knows his wine.” “Seeing you kids enjoy your drinks so much,” he said a few times, “I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary myself. I was going to wait, but what for? It’ll still be my only drink of the day.” He’d get up—“Let me, Poppa,” Gwen would say. He’d say “No. Yours would never be as good as mine.” “Grisha,” her mother would say, and he’d say “Well, you’re always telling me to be honest, so I’m being honest. I know how to make a Bloody Mary that I like to drink. If I’m only going to have one, why not the best? Gwendolyn doesn’t mind.” He’d shuffle to the kitchen. Few minutes later, he’d shuffle back carrying his Bloody Mary on a tray. He’d sit and push the ice down with a finger and drink. At least once he said “Oh, I forgot. L’chayim,” and they raised their glasses and her mother said “I wish I had a glass of water.” Gwen said “I’ll get it, Momma,” and she said “It’s all right, darling I was only saying that to have something to toast. Drink,” and she held up her hand as if she had a glass in it and said “L’chayim, everyone,” and the others said L’chayim,” and drank. One of those times after they left, he said to Gwen “How come the only time you encourage me to drink is at your folks’ apartment?” She said “You know how much it means to my father to do something for you. He wants to buy you a raincoat, he wants to go downtown with you to buy you a suit. He wants to take you out for lunch, just the two of you, and you always refuse. It’s as if you don’t want anything from anybody, and he might think it’s especially to him, so it’s good I push you. And you like to drink, and you had two when you could have stopped at one, so why are you complaining?” “I’m not complaining. And I already have a raincoat and suit. But if my drinking his Bloody Marys makes him happy, and making him happy makes you happy, then I’m happy. If only we could make your mother happy, and I’m not saying that has anything to do with getting her to drink.” “That’s sweet of you. But just our being there and also acting as a buffer between my dad and her, makes her happy. They really love you.” “Me? It’s you, the kids, they love seeing.” “You see? You always refuse. Boy, I married a character,” and he said “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me.”

When both girls were in college, and before that, when one was and the other had the little Echo to drive to high school and didn’t need one of them to pick her up anymore, Gwen and he would teach and hold office hours at the same time on the same days in the same building on campus. After school, they liked to stop off at a bagel shop on the way home to buy a half-dozen bagels. Then, as one of them drove, they’d each eat a bagel with nothing on it, he usually an everything bagel and she a sesame. Then she went on a gluten-free diet — he forgets why, but she stuck to it — and they’d stop off at the same store after school and he’d eat a bagel as they drove and she’d finger around the bottom of the bag for the seeds of the poppy and sesame bagels and the garlic and onion bits from the everything bagels and eat those. “We should ask the people at Sam’s Bagels if they could make a gluten-free bagel,” he said once when they were driving home. “There’s got to be a market for it, just as there seems to be for banana and blueberry and chocolate and Old Bay seasoning bagels and, around St. Patrick’s Day, green bagels, all of which we hate. It isn’t fair that I get to eat a whole bagel, when we’re so hungry, and you only get what’s fallen off in the bag.” She said “I doubt I’d want to eat a gluten-free bagel. Amaranth? Millet? Brown rice or quinoa? I’m sure they’d all be tasteless and difficult to chew. These dregs will hold me till we get home.”

How could he have not thought of this one till now? The examining nurse, if that’s what she’s called, sent them back home from the hospital, which they’d gone to that morning, because Gwen hadn’t dilated near enough to think she was going to give birth anytime soon. “Your baby’s coming, don’t worry about that, but probably not till late this afternoon or tonight. You don’t want to hang around here, do you? We have no place for you to lie down.” At home, about two hours later, while she was resting in bed and he was in the kitchen reading because he couldn’t stand the music the radio was playing in the bedroom — an entire morning devoted to Dvorak, they said — she started screaming. He ran in. “It’s the contractions,” she said. “I think the baby’s coming out. Check.” He lifted her nightgown; didn’t see anything. Spread her labia wide and saw the baby’s head two to three inches in and for a moment slowly moving forward. “Oh, shit,” he said. “What are we going to do? We’ll never make it to the hospital in time.” She yelled “The baby’s going to die. She’s going to die. The cord will strangle her.” “Shhh,” he said, “let me think. Worse comes to worst, I’ll pull her out myself and cut the cord with scissors, so don’t worry. Of course!” He dialed 911. The dispatcher took his name and address and asked a lot of medical questions. He said “But when will they be here?” and she said “An emergency team is already in the truck and on the way. Keep your front door open; also the door leading into the building.” “I can’t. The cats will run out. Tell the team both doors will be unlocked and just walk in.” “They’re on the way,” he told Gwen. “Feeling any better?” “Feeling better. Not as much pain. Thank you about the cats.” “Just stay calm. It’ll be all right. The damn Dvorak. It’s making me crazy,” and he shut it off. “Leave it on,” she said. It’s one of the Slavonic Dances, or Rhapsodies—I suddenly don’t remember — but the one I love most,” and she laid her head back on the pillows and closed her eyes and hummed the rhapsody or dance. He turned on the radio, unlocked the front door, went downstairs one flight with a plant and put it up against the building’s entrance door to keep it open, ran back and said “I won’t leave you again,” and stroked her forehead, which was wet, and kissed her fingers. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re my husband. Could you wipe my face?” and he wiped it with his handkerchief. “It’s clean; never used.” “And the baby’s alive?” and he said “I’m sure it is. Don’t worry.” Five minutes after he dialed 911, a woman yelled “We’re here. EMU. Which way do we go?” and he yelled “Through the kitchen and then to the right. The woman and two men came in with what seemed like valises and a duffel bag and folded-up gurney. They quickly examined her, plugged something into the wall and attached some wires to her. The vagina was dilated all the way and the baby’s skull was almost sticking out of it. “This’ll be easy,” the woman said. They delivered her on the bed, Gwen gritting her teeth and he holding her hand through it. The radio was still on and he shut it off. “Fastest delivery we ever had,” the woman who pulled out the baby and now held her said. “It’s a girl,” and he said “We know.” “Most parents don’t with the first one,” and he said “They told us earlier by accident at the obstetrician’s office. The baby looks healthy. Be honest; is she?” and she said “She looks good to me. Lots of color; breathing’s okay. Nothing clogging her and strong healthy cry. But they’ll give her a full exam in the hospital and tell you. How do you feel, Gwen? And congratulations,” and the other two, detaching wires from her and the wall and putting things back in the valises and duffel bag, said “Yeah, congratulations, ma’am.” “I hurt and I’m tired and I know I don’t look ecstatic, but I am,” Gwen said. “Thank you all so much. Are you going to cut the umbilical cord?” and the woman, cleaning the baby with what looked like Handi Wipes, said “We’ve been advised, since it isn’t necessary to do it right away, to let the doctors cut it in the hospital. Less chance of infection. Now we got to get you there,” and they opened the gurney. “What’s that?” Gwen said. “Something else feels like it’s about to come out of me,” and the woman said “I was hoping we could avoid this. Probably the placenta. Most times it takes longer to come out. Now we have to cut the cord, but it won’t hurt you or the baby,” and she cut it and pinned or tied it up and said “Do you have a clean bucket or big bowl you wouldn’t mind it being in?” Some more liquid came out and then the placenta in one piece. She picked it up and put it into the salad bowl he’d rushed into the kitchen to get. “If you don’t mind, we’ll have to take the bowl with us in case they want to look at it for anything — that part of it I’m not too knowledgeable about. You know about the fontanel?” and he said “I’ve been warned.” She handed him the baby wrapped in a towel. Then she and the men lifted Gwen onto the gurney, put a blanket over her and strapped her in. She took the baby from him and set her beside Gwen and covered them with a sheet she took out of a sealed plastic bag. One of the men said to Gwen “Keep your arm around her but not too tight. We’ll go very slow and careful.” They carried the gurney downstairs to the first floor and wheeled it to the street. Some tenants from the building were on the sidewalk and waved to Gwen and said “Good luck.” She said “See my baby?” and pulled the sheet down to the baby’s chin. He kissed Gwen and said “See you in the hospital,” and the gurney was slid into the back of the truck. “Can I come along?” he said, and the woman said “You don’t have a car? By city law you should ride up front and it’ll be crowded back there with two of us and your wife.” “I’d rather not leave them.” He sat in the seat next to the driver’s. The driver turned the siren on and they drove to the hospital he and Gwen were at a few hours before. “Siren on because you think something might be wrong with the baby?” and the driver said “No; just gets us there faster and we don’t have to stop for lights.” “It was a close one, though, wasn’t it?” and the driver said “Your baby? No, they usually turn out all right. Those little things are tougher than you think. You got a name for it?” “Rosalind. My wife’s choice. Sort of a family name.” “Everyone will call her Roz,” and he said “I hope not, but if they do, we’ll still call her Rosalind at home.” “And if it was a boy?” and he said “We knew it wasn’t, so never chose one.” “And sorry about the mess we made at your place. Couldn’t be helped. You’re going to have a lot to clean up when you get home.” “Doesn’t bother me. Right now everything’s just fine.” He looked through the little window behind him to the back. The woman and man were seated and Gwen and they had their eyes closed. He couldn’t see the baby. “Is there enough air back there? They all seem to be sleeping,” and the driver said “Probably everyone’s tired. Been a long day for all of us. It also shows there’s no problem with your wife and kid. If there was, the monitor alarm would be sounding and my co-workers would be up and working on them. You should get some sleep too. You look exhausted.” “I’ve got a long wait till then. I want to make sure everything’s okay with them first.” “They’ll be all right. Go home early. Take advantage of the hospital. We’re lucky, living in this city. It’s got a rating for being the best medical center in the country, maybe the world. I don’t know about obstetrics, but I know for just about everything else, so obstetrics has to be right up there on top too.” “Good; good. I’m still worried — that’s my nature — but I’ll be okay.”

He dropped in on his mother the day after he introduced her to Gwen. They sat in the breakfast room, each with a drink he’d made them: Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of water and for her with a lemon peel in it. “Cheers,” he said, and she said “Cheers,” and they drank. “So, Mom, tell me what you think of her,” and she said “What do I think? I think she’s wonderful and perfect for you and you for her. She’s charming, precious, elegant, very intelligent, and with such a sweet face and voice. I always wished I had a voice and complexion like hers.” “You have a nice voice. What’s wrong with your voice? And your complexion? It’s still smooth and you hardly have a line.” “Thank you. And you seem to like her parents. That’s a good sign,” and he said “Oh, what they went through. Before they came here they lost everyone in World War II but her mother’s father. To tell you the truth, her coming from people like that I find very attractive about her too.” “So you like that she’s Jewish? Because before you only went out and got serious with Gentile girls, or since you were in college,” and he said “There’s been a Jewish girl or two in there, but it’s fine.” “What I hope she doesn’t end up thinking is that you’re too old for her. More than ten years. That’s a lot.” “You and Dad were nine years apart,” and she said “And when I met him, and I was much younger than Gwen, I already thought of him as a middle-aged man. Something else could work against you. That you don’t have a profession but writing, which is a wonderful thing to do but it so far barely pays you enough to live on for one. If those don’t bother her, then everything should go well between you. I’ve got my fingers crossed. I already foresee myself feeling toward her as if she were my own daughter. I was that impressed by her at our lunch and saw immediately what sort of person she was — the best sort. So I’m warning you,” and he said “Oy, I knew this was coming.” “Listen to me. Don’t do anything stupid to lose her. You’re reaching an age where it won’t be so easy finding another girl like her, especially one with so many child-bearing years left. You want to have a family, don’t you? You’ve spoken of it enough, so I assume you still do. You’d be reducing your chances by getting a woman your own age or one a few years younger. You’re not going to get married right away. That could take a year or two and a child a year more, and two children — well, you figure it. So you’re fortunate she fell for you, or is starting to, and I can only hope and pray it gets even better and lasts.” “Come on, Mom, it can’t be that bad for me. There are plenty of terrific women out there,” and she said “If there are, then how come you always choose the wrong one? Maybe with the exception of Diana, who I liked, but that relationship was bound to fail — she was simply too capricious, which this one doesn’t seem to be. I like it that she gives you a look that she adores you. That can also stop, with a few mistakes by you, so anything you can do to help make it work, do.” “I knew you’d like her. I don’t know if she adores me, like you say, or what she really thinks of me, although she is showing some very nice feelings and seems to like being with me.” “Does she call you if you don’t call her?” and he said “What does that have to do with it? We speak to each other every day on the phone, even if we see each other that day. So yes, she does. And it’s not a case of if I call, then she makes the next call, and then I make the one after that, and so on. We call when we want to, which is a lot. Anyway, I’ll try not to screw it up, I promise.” “It’s for your benefit, you know. Mine too, of course, that I want you to finally be settled with someone so nice, but mostly yours.”

He went to his mother’s apartment the day after he got back from Maine the first time. He brought a bottle of Jack Daniels with him because she might be running low — it was the only liquor she drank — and he knew he was going to have two drinks, and then she’d want a second too. It was a hot day, around six, and they sat in the shaded L-shaped backyard that bordered what they called the breakfast room. “Cheers,” she said, and they drank. She asked if he got a lot of work done this summer, and he said “Yes.” “How was it with her parents for a week?” and he said “Fine. Her father only stayed two days. He hates mosquitoes. Reminds him too much of Uzbekistan, where he was in a Soviet internment camp. But they were very easy guests, as you were.” “I’d like to meet them again. I know I’d get to like them, short time I was with them and their having such a wonderful daughter. I could invite them for lunch,” and he said “We’ll see.” “You get along with them, though, don’t you?” and he said “Her mother can be a little overprotective of her, but yes.” “How is Gwen?” and he said “Fine.” “She teaching at Columbia this year?” and he said “Yes. Second year of her post-doc fellowship. Humanities again. I think she starts in a week.” “And you start your own teaching at NYU in a few weeks,” and he said “It’s nothing compared to hers. Continuing ed. Two fiction-writing classes that meet ten times a semester, at five hundred dollars a course. Slave wages, but it’s a start and it’ll get me out of the house.” “You need money? I can spare some,” and he said “I have enough, thanks.” “Enough might not be enough,” and he said “I’m fine.” “You don’t seem yourself, Martin. I thought you’d come in all chipper, but you seem down. Anything bothering you you want to talk about?” and he said “No.” “You don’t want to talk about it?” and he said “Nothing’s wrong.” “Don’t tell me. You know you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. It has to be something to do with Gwen.” “All right. She dumped me.” “She broke it off? I can’t believe it. When I was in Maine, you two were so close. When did this happen?” and he said “When she dropped me off at my building yesterday.” “You had no inkling?” and he said “There was some trouble between us this summer, but I thought we’d worked everything out. So a big shock.” “Is it another guy?” and he said “No. I’d rather not talk about it anymore, Mom,” and she said “What a pity. I was hoping, when you said you were coming over, for so much better news. You’re going to have to look hard for another girl like her,” and he said “I really don’t want to hear it. I feel lousy enough.” “I understand. Of course there’s nothing I can do or that you’d let me try to do to fix things,” and he said “What an idea. I can just see you calling her up and saying what a perfect match you thought we were.” “Well, it’s true; you were. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. But at least you still have your sense of humor about it. You didn’t do anything bad to make her change her mind about you?” and he said “No. I just think that in the long run she thought I wasn’t the ideal mate for her. She eventually wants marriage and children, which is what I want too and with her if I could, but she thinks I’d make a very poor provider because my writing would always come first.” “So tell her you’ll put aside most of your writing for the time being to get a good job and work hard at keeping it,” and he said “She’d see that as a desperate and insincere move on my part to get back with her. She knows me. And it’s not that I can’t write and hold down a full-time job at the same time. I’ve done it — I mean serious jobs; news work, technical writing, editing magazines — but all that’s way in the past. I’ve managed to arrange my life the last ten years where I’m basically unemployable for any other work but jobs like bartending and waiting on tables and driving a cab and teaching in continuing ed at fifty bucks a class, and that isn’t going to do it. I’ve tried to get appointments in writing departments that pay fairly well and have benefits and everything else, but nobody’s interested. I have four books and a hundred published stories and a couple of good fellowships, but they all say, when they answer me — only two have but it must be what the other fifty are thinking — that I need an M.F.A.” “You know what? I think she’s going to call you in two weeks and say she misses you and wants you two to meet to talk things over.” “She won’t call. I’ve been in this situation before. Once they say they’re though, at least with me, they’re through,” and she said “That wasn’t so with Diana. She broke it off with you so many times and then came running back, you stopped telling me.” “I should have stayed broken up with her the first time, which isn’t how I feel about Gwen. But it’s over with, really,” and she said “It’s not. Take it from me, Martin. She’ll call, maybe even sooner than two weeks, and you’ll talk and get back together and be married in a year and have children, or just one child, but you’ll be happy again and a wonderful couple. I could see this summer how much in love with you she was, and that was just a month ago and it doesn’t stop so fast,” and he said “I’m now beginning to believe she wasn’t that much in love with me at all. I now don’t even know why she even started with me.” “Don’t say that. She started with you because you’re a great catch.” “Oh yeah, great catch. No dough, no prospects, just my writing, which doesn’t pay off much. Hair going, in my forties. Sure, great catch,” and she said “You are. Stop belittling yourself. You’re handsome, you’re polite, you’re nice, built like a circus strongman, creative and smart, and you’re tall. Who wouldn’t want you? So let’s try and put our heads together to see what we can do to make things better for you. Here,” and she gave him her empty glass. “Have another drink and refill mine.” “Didn’t Dr. Gelfand say — I know he did; I was there — that for you to stop from falling and to get sufficient sleep, one per day should be your limit?” and she said “Listen to me, not him. One more won’t kill me and it’ll keep you here longer and I don’t drink this much every day.” They had another drink and talked about other things and then he left.

Whenever he brought her flowers. So why didn’t he bring them to her more? He was so cheap at times. …Their wedding in her apartment. Forty, maybe forty-five people there. The rabbi said they had to start on time — they were waiting for some guests to arrive — because he had a funeral upstate to officiate at and it took an hour to drive there, “and to a funeral you don’t want to be late.” Gwen’s piano teacher played Bach on Gwen’s piano before the ceremony began. His brother was his best man. The rabbi said “No glass to smash? What kind of Jewish wedding is this? Okay, you’re man and wife.” The ring bearer, the son of the pianist, said just before Gwen and he kissed, “Why is Marty crying?” and started giggling. His mother said “Martin, I want to talk to you in private,” and took him off to the side. She handed him an envelope. “What is this, my bar mitzvah?” he said. “Thanks, but I’m not taking anything from you,” and she said “To help defray the cost of the honeymoon.” “We’ve defrayed it already. It’s just Connecticut, an hour and half away and for three days,” and he gave her back the envelope. “Truly, Mom, it’s enough for us that you’re here.” “I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am for you both. And such gorgeous food and your bride is beautiful. But crying at your own wedding?” and he said “You know it wasn’t because I was sad.” “Of course it wasn’t. It shows how sensitive you are and how much she means to you. I’m only saying I never saw or heard of any groom doing it before, and I’ve been to plenty of weddings. I can just imagine how you’ll react when your first baby comes out and you’re in the room,” and he said “Gwen say something to you?” and she said “No, what? If you say you think she’s pregnant, that’s too much excitement for me in one day, so don’t tell me till it’s officially confirmed.” They’d made half the food the past two days and got the rest from Zabar’s. The wedding cake — a huge untiered Black Forest cake — was from Grossinger’s, the same bakery that made his bar mitzvah cake, shaped like a Holy Ark, so maybe that’s why he said what he did to his mother when she handed him the envelope. Gwen chose the beverages — champagne and cognac Winston Churchill favored and wine from the French region where she worked for a week harvesting grapes. Temperature was below zero by the time the wedding ended, so he drove his mother and several other people home on the West Side. When he got back to the apartment, there was an elderly couple who needed to be driven home across town. “We had no luck calling a private car service,” Gwen said. “And you know cabs never cruise the Drive, and it’s too cold and steep a walk to go to Broadway for one.” They cleaned up the apartment for about an hour and then went to bed. Gwen said “I’m too tired to make love,” when he started to. “But if you feel you have to fulfill some wedding night rite, and think you can, go ahead, but don’t expect a lot from me.” He tried and then said after a few minutes “We’ll wait till morning or after we get to the inn. I’m obviously too much of a flop now.” They were still so tired the next morning and a bit hungover that he called the inn to say they’d be a day late, “but not to worry: we’ll pay for the entire three days.” “Since it’s your honeymoon,” the innkeeper said, “and we’d like to think you’ll return here each year to celebrate your anniversary, we’ll waive the third day,” and he said “No, we want to pay. It’d only be fair. Maybe, in exchange, you could provide our cottage with a bottle of red wine and two wineglasses, but you don’t have to and I’m now embarrassed I asked. In fact, don’t.” Later he said to Gwen “What do you think? Should I call my mother and say I married a virgin? That’s what she said my father did with his mother the day after they got married.” The cottage had a Franklin stove and firewood and a comforter they knew would be too warm to sleep under, so he asked the innkeeper for two ordinary blankets. He thought, even though in the end he told the guy not to, there’d be a bottle of wine or champagne in the room, but there wasn’t. First thing they did after they unpacked was open the early pregnancy kit they brought with them and follow the directions. Then they took a drive, had lunch in town nearby, went to a small private modern art museum, but it was only open Friday through Sunday, bought a pair of heavy woolen socks for him because his feet were cold, came back and checked the results of the test. “Oh my goodness,” he said, hugging her, “you’re pregnant. Look at it: we’re gonna have a doughnut.”

She liked thin slices of prosciutto wrapped around a thin slice of honeydew melon. He didn’t like the combination. “Melon and ham, and all that fat? Doesn’t do it for me.” If they had prosciutto but no honeydew melon, she’d say “I can use the cantaloupe we have. It’s not nearly as good with prosciutto as honeydew, but it’s still quite good if you slice it real thin.” If they had prosciutto but no honeydew or any other melon, she’d sometimes say “Know what I’d love with this?” and he’d say “I do, and if you want I’ll go to the market and pick up one. If they don’t have honeydew, then a cantaloupe, and if they don’t have that either, which I’d be very surprised at, then a ripe melon of some kind.” If they had honeydew at home but no prosciutto and she said she’d love to have some with melon — she never said it if they just had cantaloupe or some other kind of melon — he’d say “I’ll get some at the Italian market in Belvedere Square,” and if they were in Maine, “the gourmet market in Blue hill. If they don’t have it, then I’m willing to go all the way to Rooster Brothers in Ellsworth, who always carry it and sometimes two or three versions of it.” “Since I’m the only one here who’s going to have it,” she said, “you don’t have to go just for me,” and he said “But I want to and I could use the break.” And if the kids were home: “And I’ll take the kids with me, if they want, and get them a treat there too.” “If you do get prosciutto,” she reminded him a couple of times, “make sure you first ask for the Parma kind and sliced paper thin. It’s twice as expensive as the American prosciutto — to cut the cost you can even ask for a little less than a quarter of a pound — but it’s more than worth it.”

He bumped into the daughter of Gwen’s Ph.D. advisor on Broadway. It was near where her family owned a brownstone off Riverside Drive and about ten blocks south from where he and Gwen had their apartment. They got to talking — the usual stuff: “How’s Gwen?” “How’s the family?” “How’s your writing going?” “How’s school?”—and then she said she wanted to tell him something she never told him or Gwen but had her parents. “I once saw you and Gwen not far from here in front of the Cuban restaurant on a Hundred-ninth on this side of Broadway. That’s probably why I’m now recalling it. This took place soon after she brought you to our house for dinner and we first met you, so long before you were married and had kids. I didn’t reveal myself to you and Gwen on the street because, corny as this must sound, you only seemed to have eyes for each other, which I think is also why you didn’t notice me, and I didn’t want to spoil it by saying hello. I was young but I at least knew that. You were standing on the sidewalk, each holding one of those corrugated paper cups of what I guess you’d call Cuban ice. I’d got some of it there myself a few times. You fed Gwen a plastic spoonful of it out of your cup — you must have had different flavors — and she in turn gave you a spoonful from hers. You did this a few times, then kissed. Then you each finished your own ices and you dumped your cup and spoon into a trash can at the corner — I think you even took Gwen’s cup and spoon to dump with yours — and grabbed each other’s hand and walked up Broadway, I assume towards home. I’d never seen a couple so happy, is what I’m saying. I thought, watching you walk, when I fall in love with someone, that’s the way I want it to be.” “You know, we’ve had our bad moments too,” he said, “and once even stopped seeing each other for a while, maybe even around that time,” and she said “Of course; every couple goes through that, and sometimes more than once. But then, it was pure joy between you two, and what a wonderful thing to witness. It really seemed rare.” When he got back to the apartment he told Gwen who he’d met on the street and what she’d told him. She seemed to think about it a few seconds and then said “I don’t remember that day but I’m sure it happened. I do remember the ices at the Cuban restaurant that they used to scoop into paper cups. We should go there and get some one of these days, or their bolitas, I think they call that fruit drink. I love them.”

Another scene he thinks he already thought about tonight. Once? More? Twice? It was about a month after they started sleeping together. They were in bed, it was night, lights were off. Her back was to him. He moved his hand down the side of her body to her underpants, to get inside them and eventually to pull them off, and felt her two cats there, lying against her thigh. His hand jumped. The cats didn’t move. She laughed and said “I forgot to tell you. They occasionally like to sneak under the covers with me. Do you mind?” and he said “At the moment, yes. I’d rather not have them there.” “Gee,” she said, “I don’t know how to stop them, or if I want to. They’re used to my letting them stay there. It’s the cold.” “Please,” he said, “could you try? Or I could do it.” She picked up the cats one at a time and set them down on the floor. They jumped back up and crawled under the covers again. He leaned over her, pulled back the covers and pushed the cats off the bed. “Be nice,” she said. “Remember, they were here first and you’re taking their place and they might feel squeezed out.” “Do you think I did it too roughly? I’m sorry. — I’m sorry, cats,” he said. “Try to understand.” He pulled the covers back over her, waited about a minute, stroked her thighs and pulled her panties off and tried tugging her nightshirt over her head and she said “Let me keep it on. I’m also cold.”

She’d come into the kitchen in their New York apartment, where he’d be working at the typewriter table by the window, and say “Like to take a break?” She’d come into the bedroom of the cottage in Maine they rented and say “Are you deeply involved in something that can’t be immediately interfered with or in the next few minutes?” She’d come halfway down the basement stairs of the first house they had in Baltimore, or just yell down the stairs from the top “Martin, think you can tear yourself away from your typewriter for a brief intermission?” She’d come into the narrow storage room where he worked in their Baltimore apartment for six years, or else knock on the door frame of it, and say “Care to take a short rest?” She’d come upstairs to the spare bedroom he’d turned into his study in the farmhouse in Maine they rented and say “Would you have strenuous objections to being interrupted awhile? I hope not, and it’d be a nice way to break up the day.” She’d meet him at the front door after he’d just come back from town in Maine and pretend to stifle a yawn with her hand and say “I’m a little tired. Are you, or do you need to get right to work?” She’d say to him after he’d come back from driving the kids to day camp in Maine or to school in Baltimore or after walking them to school in New York when he was on sabbatical for a year: “I know it’s early and you probably want to get to your writing, but would you like to take a pre-work break?” She’d come in to whatever room he was writing in, from behind put her hands over his eyes or arms around his chest or cheek against his cheek or chin on his shoulder and say “Don’t jump. It’s only me. Like to take a breather?” or “Recess time. Think you’d like to join me?” or “What do you say, my dearie? Kids are out of the house. Not expected back for hours. We’ve already put in a good morning’s work. Want to have some fun? I know I feel like it.” Of course he did this lots of times to her too. He thinks he never refused her, or at most said “Just let me finish what I’m doing — it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes — and then, if you’re in bed, I’ll meet you there.” While she said a number of times something like “If you’re suggesting what I think it is, don’t I wish I could. We’ll have other opportunities.”

Here’s another one he doesn’t know why it keeps coming back. Strange thing is, the woman in it was Gwen’s best friend since college and he suddenly now can’t think of her name. He tries to come up with it again. Runs through the alphabet. Still can’t. Okay. But that evening. This woman and her husband, Vincent, and their two kids and his family had dinner in Chinatown at a restaurant Vincent recommended. Vincent and his wife had been there several times and he ordered for all of them, even the kids. “No,” Vincent said, “you have to eat what we eat — I promise you won’t regret it, and there’ll be plenty to choose from — although you don’t have to have squid.” As usual, Vincent ordered too much. After Gwen and he had thought all of them were done eating, Vincent said “I still want to get their very special scallops and mussels in garlic sauce. What we don’t devour, you’ll take home with you and have it for lunch tomorrow or for dinner in Baltimore tomorrow night, along with the rest of the doggy-bagged food I want you to have. But you can’t leave here without tasting the dish fresh out of the kitchen.” “No, no, we’re stuffed,” they said, and Vincent said “Yes, yes, there’s always room for a pinch of something more.” Gwen’s best friend said to them “Don’t argue; there’s no stopping him when it comes to good food and drink. And because he over-ordered and there’ll be plenty left over, you’re going home with it, so it’s your treat.” “Then we’ll buy the pastries, later,” Martin said, and Vincent said “Not on your life. When you’re in our part of the city, you’re our guests.” They lived on Broome Street in SoHo. They walked from Chinatown through Little Italy to get there. Vincent and his son went into an Italian bakery and came out with two large white boxes each tied with string and full of cookies and cannoli and other Italian pastries. Then they went to their loft and plates of dried and fresh fruit were put out and Vincent opened a bottle of fifty-year-old Armagnac and one of a rare Port and they ate and drank and the adults reminisced once more about how each couple had first met and how soon they knew they were in love—“With me, it was my first sight of Gwen,” and she said “I’ve heard that from him before and I don’t see how it could be possible. As for me, though I found him immediately attractive, falling in love took a while longer.” The kids made up a play for four lead roles and wrote it down and spent fifteen minutes rehearsing it in another room and then in costume performed it. The adults clapped and cheered and booed at the right moments and then finished the evening with Irish coffees, though he had his coffee straight because he was driving. And as the two families went downstairs in what used to be this former commercial building’s freight elevator, which Vincent let his son run, and then outside in front of the building where the car was parked, they kissed and hugged one another and said what a great evening it had been. “We always have good times together,” Gwen said. “I don’t think I’ve heard Martin laugh like that since the last time we were here. The doggy bags. Did we take them?” and their kids held them up. “Goodbye, goodbye,” their friends and their kids said to them, waving and blowing kisses as they drove off, and they all waved and blew kisses back. “Steer me to the West Side Highway once we get to Houston Street,” he said to Gwen. “I always get lost,” and she said “You don’t go to Houston Street. But I’ll get you there.” When they were on the highway and heading uptown to their apartment, he said “That was terrific tonight. What wonderful people, children and adults. I’m so glad you know them. And the kids get along so well together. — Did you have a good time, kids?” and one said “I did, Daddy,” and the other said “It was great. I had so much fun. We should do it again soon. Can’t we live in New York always?” “It would be nice. We could also see your grandparents more. But what can we do? We’re sort of stuck.” And to Gwen: “It’s probably dumb of me to ask, but you had a good time too, didn’t you?” and she said “It was delightful. I’m so glad we all like each other.” “I love your friends,” he said, and she said “And they love you.” “And they’d give the world for you, of course, and our darling children, which makes me happy in case anything happened to me,” and she said “Don’t think of it. You’re going to live forever, but I know what you mean.” He still can’t remember her best friend’s name. First time he thinks he forgot it. It’ll come. It’s not Natalie. It’s not Naomi. It’s not Ronnie. But it’s something close. This happens. Maybe more now than before. Don’t worry about it.

It was a few months after they first met. He was having two wisdom teeth extracted under gas at a specialist’s office on West 57th Street. “I just don’t want to hear the bones again, or whatever they are, crunch when the teeth are being pulled out.” She asked if he wanted her to come along with him. “Thanks, but I’ll be all right.” “You always say you’ll be all right,” and he said “Believe me, I’ll be fine, once the teeth are out.” She came anyway. He was in the recovery room when a dental assistant said “There’s someone here for you. Good thing, too, as we were worried how you’d get home.” “Why? I’m not driving. And I know who it is.” He was escorted out of the room. Gwen was sitting in the waiting room, reading a magazine. She said “Oh, my poor darling,” and was about to kiss him and he said “Don’t. That’s my bad side. Actually, both sides are bad, but that one’s beginning to hurt. It’s so nice of you to come here. Am I talking funny? I seem to sound it. And I now see I can use your help. You’re so considerate. So nice. So nice. We’ll get a cab to my building and then you can continue in it to yours.” “No, you’re coming home with me and staying the night. You’re a bit shaky and I want to make sure you’ll be okay.” As they were walking to the elevator, she holding his arm and saying “Lean on me if you need,” he said “This is real service. Did I ever tell you what Diana did when I was in the hospital after an operation on my leg?” “What she didn’t do, you mean. You were living with her in the Village then.” “East Tenth. I don’t mean to bad-mouth her, but she never came to visit me. I was there for two days. Memorial, so just a bus ride up First or Second. I didn’t have insurance then — I still don’t — and it was costing me plenty out of pocket, but they wouldn’t discharge me till I was able to walk out of the hospital — at least to the elevator on my floor — on my own. And she also didn’t come to the hospital to help me get home, and I could barely walk. I went in there with them thinking it was cancer — neurofibromatosis; one of the things my father had but didn’t die of. But after they cut me open and sent a piece of me to the pathologist, it turned out to be a Baker’s cyst, which all they needed to do was drain. To top it off, it was Diana’s former father-in-law I went to, whom she got to examine me gratis, and he diagnosed me and sent me to this surgeon. A double doctor screw-up. So what am I saying? I forgot.” “I think it was about my picking you up here. Diana. That I acted differently.” “That is what I’m saying. You’re everything I ever wanted. I’m so glad it took me this long.” “What a nice thing for you to say. I’ll remember it if we ever have an argument and you say about me what a mistake you made.”

They were in a mall in Baltimore. Maureen, a few months old, was in a baby carrier on Gwen’s chest. Gwen said she wanted to look around a little. “In stores that would bore you and make you irritable. Could you look after Rosalind? I know you’d prefer sitting on a bench here and reading, or having a coffee, but the two of them will be too much for me to deal with. Meet you back here in an hour? It’s almost two, so say, three?” He walked around with Rosalind. Went into a store and bought a short-sleeved T-shirt because the two he had were starting to have holes in the collar. Went to a different floor and looked in a bookstore window. “I know what,” he said. “Let’s go to the food court and get something.” He turned around. She wasn’t behind him where she was just before. He looked around. How the hell could she have gotten away so fast? The bookstore. That’s what he should have suggested to her. She loves picture books and they’ve been in it before. He looked around inside. Went to all the stores nearby. Ran in, looked, ran out, quickly said to a salesperson “Have you seen a little girl here alone? She’s three, but tall for her age. Blond. Very pretty.” All the time looking around him for her. “Wearing…wearing what? I don’t know what she’s wearing. Name’s Rosalind.” “So she’s lost?” one saleswoman said. “Want me to call Security?” “Call. Give my description. Tall, blond, three. Very pretty. Name’s Rosalind. Tell them I’m worried.” She called. “Missing child. A girl. Blond. — Very blond?” and he said “Very.” “Three. Tall for her age. Name’s Rosalind. Can you send someone up here? The father — you’re the father?” and he said “Yes.” “Is frightened something’s happened to her.” “I’ll look around in the meantime; leave my things here,” and he put the bag with the shirt in it and a book on a counter and ran out of the store and looked in all the stores he hadn’t been in yet on the floor, running down one side of the mall, then the other. The department stores at each end of the floor. Looked in, but they were much too large. “What am I going to do?” he said. “What am I going to do?” Gwen. Ran to the escalator well and yelled “Gwen, come quick. It’s me, Martin. Second floor. By the escalator. Rosalind’s lost.” Repeated it. Then yelled “Rosalind, it’s Daddy. If you can hear me, come to my voice. Come to Daddy. Go to the escalator so I can see you. Ask people where the escalator is.” People stopped. Some of them asked what it was and if they could help. “Yes,” he said. “Look for my daughter. She’s lost. She’s three. Alone. Tall for her age. Pretty. Very blond. Name’s Rosalind.” “What’s she wearing?” someone said. “That would help.” “I don’t know. That’s right. Red and white striped long-sleeved shirt and blue overalls. Look in all the stores above and below. I’ll go to the food court. Security’s also looking. If you find her, tell Security.” Several of them went in different directions. One said “I can’t help. I have to be home. But don’t worry, it’ll be all right. I’m sure they never lost a child here. Just looks that way to the parents while it’s happening.” “Good. Excuse me.” He was about to get on the up escalator to the food court when he saw Rosalind going down the escalator to the main floor. He didn’t want to yell her name because she might get startled and fall. She was holding the railing with one hand as he and Gwen had instructed her to. She stumbled a little getting off. Then he yelled from the top of the escalator “Rosalind. Rosalind. Stay where you are.” She looked around and then up at him. She didn’t move. He went down the escalator. When he got to her, she smiled and he took her hand, got them out of the way of people, dropped to one knee, held her with his eyes shut and then looked up at her and said “What were you doing? I thought you were lost. Daddy was so worried. I should hit your hand, just slap it lightly, something I’ve never done, so you’d remember never to run away from me like that again, but I won’t. Please, dear, never do it again. Do you hear? Do you understand?” and she started crying. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and he held her closer. Then he saw Gwen coming down the escalator. From halfway up, she said “Was that you shouting out my name?” He nodded and she said “What were you saying? I couldn’t make it out. And why’s Rosalind crying?” Rosalind squirmed out of his hold and ran to her and hugged her waist. He stood up and said “She disappeared for a few minutes and I panicked. I got the whole mall looking for her. It’s all right now. I didn’t hit her. I suppose I looked angry for a few seconds, though I didn’t feel my face forming an expression in that way, so she’s just afraid. I’m still a little unsettled. But how’d it go with you? Get what you want?” and she said “I did. Perfume. Jessica McClintock, my favorite. A terrific sale on it. It’ll last me ten years. And for some reason, with each purchase they give you a small stuffed animal — mine’s a rabbit — which the kids will like.” “Then let’s get out of here. But let me get my package and book first. I left them in a store upstairs.” “Oh, you bought something?” and he said “A T-shirt. Not on sale but reasonably priced. I needed it. I also have to tell Security everything’s okay. Wait here. People might stop and ask you — they were very kind and went out looking for Rosalind — if this is the girl who was lost. If they do, thank them for me.” “I wasn’t lost,” Rosalind said. “Okay, we’ll talk about that later,” and he brushed her hair back with his hand and took the escalator up.

He drove to Brooklyn to a friend of Gwen’s who had a very good crib to give them. “And you can keep it,” she said, when he called for directions to her building. “Or after you’re through with it, give it to someone you like. We’ve definitely maxed out at two, so we won’t be needing it anymore.” Gwen was in her eighth month with Rosalind. He left at six in the morning and hoped to be back by midafternoon, avoiding heavy traffic both ways. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?” he said, just before he left, and she said “I’ll be fine. It’s you. I don’t want you getting tired on the road with so much driving.” “I’ve driven a lot more by myself than eight hours in a day, and without an hour’s break, which I promise I’ll take — even a nap — when I get there, so don’t worry. Go back to sleep.” He was approaching the Holland Tunnel on the Jersey Turnpike when he heard a piece of music on the radio for chorus, soloists and orchestra. He loved it. It was still playing when he parked near the woman’s building, so he sat in the car listening to it till it was over. He wanted to know the name of it and the composer so he could buy the record soon after he got back to Baltimore. It was an oratorio: A Child of Our Time, by Michael Tippett. And “Sir,” so he assumed he was English, and because it’s a modern piece, maybe still living. Never heard of him, and what a coincidence: the title of the piece and all those sweet children’s voices in it, as he drives in to pick up a crib for his own child. He wrote it down — also the conductor and orchestra — in his memobook; had a Danish and coffee with the woman, got the crib into his car’s trunk and a bag of baby and toddler clothes and a long padded bumper to go around inside the crib and drove back. He told Gwen about the music. “One of the most stirring pieces for voice and orchestra I’ve ever heard, and I don’t think I missed much of it, though I won’t be able to tell till I hear it again. It was the highlight of my trip.” “So let’s buy it,” she said. “From everything you said, I want to hear it, and it doesn’t seem like something the Baltimore Symphony will ever play.” “It might be an expensive recording,” and she said “What of it? Once the baby’s born, think of all the money we won’t be spending on restaurants and concerts and so forth by staying home. And just the coincidence, as you said, that it was about a child.” “I’m not sure what it was about,” he said. “Though it was in English, I was able to make out very few words. I do know there were parts in it with children’s voices, and there’s the title. Okay, I’ll get it, or maybe have to order it at the record store.” He bought the record the next day and played it that night. He didn’t like the first side of it. It didn’t seem the same piece, though he recognized some parts and it was the recording he’d heard in the car and their record player had much better sound than the car radio. He thought he must have been in some other state of mind when he first heard it, or it was because of the small enclosed space of the car, or something, but he just couldn’t explain it. “So what do you think so far?” he said, when he turned the record over to the second side but didn’t put the needle down on it yet. “Oh, it’s pretty good,” and he said “Once again, you’re just being nice. Don’t worry about my feelings. You didn’t like it, say so.” “It’s true. It wasn’t as stirring and beautiful as you made it out to be. It could be I just don’t like twentieth-century English music.” “Ralph Vaughan Williams? The Lark Ascending? His Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis? You love those.” “I thought, because of the way his first name is pronounced, he was Scottish or Welsh,” and he said “No, English. And Britten’s Simple Symphony and Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge? And some stuff by Frank Bridge too?” “I’m unfamiliar with him. And maybe I’m only talking about twentieth-century English music for voices,” and he said “Britten again. Les Illuminations and his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and something else. Strings. But why am I giving you a hard time and acting like a pedant? I’m sorry. I felt the same way about the piece. A disappointment. It had its moments when the kids sang. I love children’s voices — Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and at the end of the first act of Tosca when the boys choir from the church comes in. But it didn’t seem the same music I heard driving on the Turnpike, which was then blanked out in the Holland Tunnel, and then going across Manhattan to Brooklyn and sitting in the car near Penny’s building till it was over. I was overwhelmed by all of it. Not a bad part. What could it be that changed it for me?” and she said “I can’t help you on that.” “Let’s put it away for now and listen to the rest some other time, or only I’ll listen to it and from the beginning. What’ll really make me screwy is if I find I love it again. And I should probably set up the crib,” and she said “There’s no hurry. The baby’s going to sleep in the pram in our room the first three or four months.” “Then just to do something and get it out of the way. I hate things unassembled and in lots of parts and leaning against the wall or taking up too much room on the floor and the chance of it falling down or our tripping on it,” and she said “Okay. I’ll help.”

Her miscarriage. Odd that he hadn’t thought about it till now, or had he? Gwen was in for her annual gynecological exam. It was about two years after Maureen was born. The doctor asked for a urine sample. She sat on the toilet there for half an hour, she said, and couldn’t pee a drop, so the nurse practitioner, he thinks she was, catheterized her and botched up the procedure. She poked the fetus with the catheter. Something like that. Or touched something in the vagina with the catheter that started the miscarriage. He knows they’re two distinctive holes, but that’s what he thinks Gwen told him. It was so long ago; he forgets most of it. And Gwen came home and was never clear about what happened, and he knew it upset her so much that she didn’t like talking about it, so he didn’t ask her about it much after that day to get the details straight. He remembers her saying that night “All I can tell you is that the woman did a lousy-ass job — I actually think she wasn’t adequately trained for it and had her eyes closed when she inserted the catheter — and she and the doctor weren’t very apologetic about it either. Afraid of a suit, you think? They knew we didn’t want another child”—“You mean you didn’t want another,” he said — and she said “All right, I didn’t, so they may have thought they’d done us a favor. But they still could have shown some remorse.” She hadn’t known she was pregnant. So it was very early on; maybe the first or second month. “Did you see it?” and she said “It was almost too small to see — certainly too early to tell what sex it was, and technically not even a fetus yet. And after they scooped it all out and I got off the table, I think they flushed it down the toilet. No, I’m sure they have a special disposal bag for that.” He got sad. Some tears too. “Oh, what’s wrong, my darling? I’m being too cold and clinical about it, I know.” “This was probably our last chance to have another child,” he said. “If it hadn’t been aborted and you had come home and said you’d found out you were pregnant, I would have asked you to have the baby.” “I’ve told you,” she said. “I never wanted to get pregnant again. I want to get on with my life other than just being a mother and part-time teacher. And two’s ideal for me and them, and should be for you too, and affordable.” He would have begged her to have the baby and he thinks she would have gone through with it because it meant so much to him. That so? He’s almost sure of it. He’d have three kids now. The third might be in his first year of college. She did say “We have to be more careful with my diaphragm. I take full blame for what happened because I’m the one who put it in. But I have a bit of arthritis in my left hand. Also, in that hand, this bony knob or swelling below the thumb near the wrist that’s painful sometimes and which I’ll get checked out, but in the meantime get a brace for it at night, so I’ll need to teach you how to put the diaphragm in when I don’t feel a hundred percent able to.” “Glad to, but who’s to say I’ll do it correctly? It’d seem it’d take a lot of practice,” and she said “I can feel when it’s in right. It doesn’t slip or hurt. This time I must have just let it go, or your penis knocked it awry.” “It can do that?” and she said “Sure, although I think I would have felt that too, so I don’t know.”

He often walked the forty blocks from his apartment building to hers. He doesn’t think she ever walked from her building to his. The ten or so times she was in his apartment, and two or three times she stayed the night in the almost two years they saw each other before he got the job in Baltimore, she came by taxi or subway or bus. Or walked up from West End Avenue and 74th Street after her therapy session, or she was with him after they went to a restaurant or movie or dinner party that was a lot closer to his apartment than hers, so they ended up there. Usually, though, if she was in his neighborhood with him at night, she said she’d like to go home to take care of her cats, or some other reason — she didn’t have her diaphragm or medication with her; she wanted to get an early start in the morning; she still had some work to do that night — and he almost always went with her. Times he didn’t, he put her in a cab. To get to her building, he walked down 75th Street from his building to Columbus Avenue or Amsterdam Avenue or Broadway. Sometimes he went north on Columbus to 96th Street — farther than that, the neighborhood could get a little dangerous — and then go to Broadway and head north to her building from there. More times, he took Amsterdam to 96th Street, and a couple of times to a Hundred-third — Amsterdam seemed safer than Columbus around there — and then go to Broadway and walk to a Hundred-fourteenth and then down to Riverside Drive and her building. Most times — nine out of ten, he’d say — he walked north from Broadway and 75th Street all the way to a Hundred-fourteenth, and almost always on the west side of the street because it was more interesting — more pedestrians, it seemed, and restaurants, markets, bookstores, coffee shops, sidewalk vendors — than the east side of the street, at least once he got past 79th. Also, on Broadway, he liked that he occasionally bumped into people he knew, something he doesn’t ever remember doing on Columbus or Amsterdam. For some reason this seemed to happen a lot more above 96th Street than below. Did he know more people up there? Doesn’t think so. Although from about a Hundred-sixth Street on he would see people from her apartment building she’d introduced him to or he’d met at gatherings she was invited to there or just recognized from the elevator or lobby or standing in front of the building or had started up conversations with in the elevator or lobby, or at the annual pre-Christmas party and used-book sale on the ground floor and once at a party in the lobby for a much-loved doorman who was retiring after working there for thirty years. He also has to consider that her building was much closer to Broadway than his. He never walked to her building from Central Park West or West End Avenue. They’d be dull walks, and going up to Central Park West would be taking him a little out of the way. He doesn’t know why he never walked to her building even part of the way on Riverside Drive. He now sees it could have been an interesting walk, with the view of this park and river from various spots, and if the sun was setting, beautiful. He did, a couple of times, walk inside Riverside Park from 79th Street and Riverside Drive to a Hundred-tenth. And he once jogged from his building to Riverside Park and then all the way in it to a Hundred-tenth and Riverside Drive, walking the last two blocks to her building so he wouldn’t come into the lobby panting and sweating. He walked a few times to her building when it was snowing, even heavily, because he always dressed for it — warm coat, wool cap, boots, gloves — and he had a complete change of clothing at her place, which she didn’t have at his, if any of his got wet. He never, though, walked there when it was raining hard. Then, with an umbrella and raincoat, he’d take the subway or bus. If the weather was sticky and hot, he’d still walk to her building, but more slowly, and about half the times stopped around 86th or 90th Street and Broadway and took the bus the rest of the way. He also never — or maybe he did this once and found out it was a mistake — walked to her place with a heavy package or two or a briefcase loaded down with books. Sometimes he stopped for coffee on these walks. Or he’d pick up food for them for dinner that night, Chinese or Indian takeout or from the market right up the block from her building, or bread or pastries or both from one of the bakeries or gourmet food stores on Broadway. Then he would reach her building, say hello to the doorman, take the elevator up and ring her bell, even after he had a key to her apartment for more than a year, just to have her open the door and smile at him, and often she’d already be smiling, and say something like “Hiya, lovie” or “I’m so happy to see you” and he’d say something like “I’m so happy to see you too,” and they’d kiss, a lot of those times even before one of them shut the door.

She thought of and arranged so many of the things for them. The one big exception that he can think of now might be the apartment in Baltimore they moved into five weeks before Rosalind was born. He was at a dinner party about six months before and a woman there, an art history professor at his school, mentioned she had a year’s sabbatical in New York the next academic year and was looking for a sublet there. “That’s a coincidence,” he said. “My wife and I will have to find a nice apartment here. Maybe we could swap for a year.” He looked at hers, liked it, she said she liked theirs sight unseen—“Doorman? Columbia area? Overlooking the river? And at that rent? Let’s shake on it”—and when the year was up they stayed on because the woman got a teaching position somewhere else. He was also the one who suggested they add a porch to their house, but she got the builders for it and designed it herself. They were sitting on the porch of the farmhouse they rented in Maine. Maybe ten years ago. Having a drink and watching the sky light up in different colors from the sunset, and out of nowhere he said “I just had a brilliant idea. The sky inspired it. You might not go for it, but it’s so pleasant out here, why don’t we have a porch like this one built onto our house?” “Not go for it?” she said. “I love the idea and have thought of it myself several times but never brought it up because I was sure you’d say it would be too expensive.” “Hang money for once,” he said. “I’ve been thrifty for too long. Save, save, save, and for what? For something like this. And what could it cost? Oh, maybe a lot. But the house is paid up and the expenses and taxes for it aren’t too bad. A porch would raise the value of it a little, so also the assessment of the house the next time around. But we both have good jobs — mine I can’t be fired from — and where we get a small raise every year. And we’ll keep it simple. Interchangeable glass and screens. Raw wood. No fancy furniture or embellishments. When we want something to sit on, we’ll bring out the chairs from inside. Okay, that’s going too far. Buy two chairs. Buy a little table. I figure the best spot for it would be off the living room, since we have that door to the outside there we never use and all that space it opens to. Though we won’t be able to see the sky like this from it and the occasional rainbow, we’ll still have a nice view of our woods and the road. We’ll watch joggers jogging past. Cyclists. The mail deliverers in their electric trucks. But you tell me.” “I can’t believe you’re saying this,” and he said “I know. Because I’ve also been so cheap.” She took his free hand and squeezed it. “That clinches the deal,” he said. Maureen came out and said “Why’s Mommy crying?” “Is she? Over something as silly as a porch.” The VCR. Rosalind was a few months old. Gwen said “That poor French poet I’m translating wrote that he bought a VCR in Paris and watched Fanny and Alexander on it. If he can afford one, we can too. I want to be able, when I don’t feel like reading while I’m breastfeeding or just listening to the radio, to have something to watch other than mindless morning and afternoon TV. And it’s Bergman, and that one we missed and some people say it’s his best.” “I don’t mean to sound stupid, but what exactly is a VCR and what do the initials stand for?” and then asked what she thought one would cost. She said “The Sun’s running ads with VCRs being much cheaper than they were last year, which means they’re probably half of what they go for in France. And the video cassettes — I’ve looked into it at the record store in the Rotunda Mall, which has a whole wall of them — are only three dollars to rent for the new releases and two dollars for the oldies, and the new ones you can keep for two days and the old ones for a week.” “Sounds good to me. It should be fun.” They bought a VCR player that week and rented Fanny and Alexander at the Rotunda record store. She read the instruction manual how to hook up the VCR player to the television set and how to play the cassette, and they watched the movie. “That was terrific,” he said. “Not the film as much as I thought it’d be but to be able to see it in your own home, and you put everything together so easily. Next time teach me how to use it.” “It’s all in the manual. Read it,” and he said “Me? Learn from an instruction manual? Just imagine what would have happened if I were the one who had to set up the VCR player. It would have ended with me kicking it across the room. Better, you show me how to put the cassette in and play it next time we rent one, because I don’t want to have to keep relying on you so much.” Getting things done in the house like new drapes and their bedroom carpet cleaned. She said “I want to explain why we need new drapes in all the rooms we have them in so you don’t think I’m putting us through an unnecessary large expense. They’re old, soiled beyond cleaning, torn in places, and came with the house when it had different colored walls.” He said “Our bedroom drapes, maybe, since we use them almost every night. But we’ve never drawn the drapes closed in the dining and living rooms, so can’t we just take them down and not replace them?” “No. If we did that, the sides of those windows would look bare.” “I don’t want to get into an argument about it,” he said, “but it never would have crossed my mind to change any of them, bedroom drapes included. They all look fine to me. I also don’t like the idea of more workmen in the house, measuring, fitting, choosing the right colors, and then installing them.” “Don’t worry; you won’t have to deal with any of it. I don’t mind taking care of it. I like doing it. I like making the house look nice.” And he said “So do I, but okay. You want? Do. I can see you’re determined and that you don’t think I know much of what I’m talking about.” After the drapes were hung, he said “I have to hand it to you. The rooms look much nicer with the new drapes,” and she said “I thought you’d appreciate the difference once they were up. And these are washable, while the old ones would have run.” She said their bedroom carpet was stained in a dozen places because the cat had vomited on it so many times and from the coffee he’s spilled carrying it to his desk. He went in to look and she followed him. “I don’t think it’s so bad,” and she said “Of course not. And look at the carpet in the hallway outside here,” and he looked and said “That too. I’ll get some carpet cleaner and do it myself.” “Like for how many years you promised to scrape and paint the register grill in our bathroom because it was so rusty, till I finally had to do it for you. No, the carpet is in such sad shape, it has to be done professionally. If it’s all right with you — well, really; even if it isn’t; give me this, please? — I’ve made an appointment for a carpet-cleaning company to come. They’re offering a special price for an introductory one-room cleaning, and they’ll throw in the hallway. Unfortunately, the carpet will be wet for an entire day, so you’ll have to bring your typewriter to the dining-room table and work there.” “How much is this introductory offer?” and she told him and he said “For one fifteen-by-twenty-foot room, or even twenty-by-twenty-four? Okay, I won’t object. If I do, you’ll say I always object to these things,” and she said “I probably would, because you do.” After the carpet was cleaned and he’d removed the little square pieces of paper from underneath all the furniture legs in the bedroom, he said “Want to know what?” and she said “You’re about to say the carpet looks pretty good.” “They really did a job. It looks as new as when it was first put down. But one question. Why’d we ever get such a light color that shows all the stains?” and she said “We both agreed to it, don’t you remember?” “I think you gave me three to four swatches of almost the same gray color, each one slightly lighter than the next, but let’s not go into it. Your decision to get the carpet cleaned turned out to be a great success.” Taxes. Before he knew her, he always did the short form. “Why?” he told her. “Because it’s quick, easy, I’m used to it, and I never made much money.” She urged him to do the 1040. “The section C form was made for you. You’re a writer so you have a little profit from your writing but lots of losses. Once you know how to do it — and what would it take you? A few hours? And your earnings are bound to increase over the years — it’ll begin to pay off.” “You know me by now. I hate change. All that time learning something new interferes with what I really like doing. If, by some accident, I make a bundle from one of my writings, I’ll be able to pay for a tax accountant.” She offered to do his taxes that year. “Then, the next tax year, just copy out what I’ve done.” “No, you’ve got your own things to do — taxes, teaching, writing, reading,” and she said “But I love you. So I like doing things for you. And this is something, because of my father, I’ve learned how to do well. If you happen to get back much more from the IRS than you usually do, or you have to pay it much less, you can treat me to an expensive dinner at a place of my choosing, or at least a relatively modest dinner with an expensive wine.” This was for the ’78 returns, so around March ’79, a few months after they’d met. She did his taxes the next two or three years — let’s see: ’79’s, ’80’s and ’81’s, so three. Then they got married and they filed a joint return. She’d call her father for advice every night she was doing the taxes. “You don’t have more gifts to charity than that in Schedule A?” “Martin’s taking too large a loss for his writing, when you compare it to what he earned from it, and five years straight? You’ll be flagged.” “By now,” she said he told her, “you do it so well I could hire you as my assistant and pay you good wages, but stick to your teaching. Less stress and longer vacations and more time with your husband and darling little angels.” Then she’d fax him the completed 1040 form, he’d go over it for errors and what she might have missed and mail it back with his new corrections, and she’d fill out the entire form again but in ink this time. She never once finished the returns before the last day. “Done yet?” he’d say around eight that night. “We don’t want to be penalized for filing late or draw suspicion from the IRS,” and she’d say “I need another half an hour” or “hour.” Two hours later or so — one time it was 11:30—she’d say “Hurray. I’m done. All I need now is your signature,” and he’d sign the second page of the federal and state forms above her signature, stick them into their envelopes, which he’d already put stamps on, and drive to the main post office in downtown Baltimore — trip took about twenty minutes at that hour — and drop them in their respective baskets postal workers held up to his car window or the one on the passenger side. He said one time after he got back “I wish we didn’t always have to wait till the last minute to get our income taxes in,” and she said “I’m sorry, but that seems to be what it takes.” “Couldn’t you start doing them a week or two earlier?” and she said “Because you think I’d get them done sooner? It doesn’t work like that. Listen, though. Have we ever been audited? Ever wonder why? But if it’s too much for you, we can get a tax specialist to do them from now on. That’d also mean less work for my father. He works too hard as it is during tax season, and I’d love for him to cut back,” and he said “Nah, it’s okay. We’ve never been late, and I can handle the pressure. And it’s kind of fun down there the last night, with all the tax protesters and their banners and chants. You should come with me next time. A kind of excitement you never see in Baltimore except, I guess, at Ravens games.” Bookcases in their house. She said “I can’t stand our books all over the place and in different bookcases, but not enough of them and each in worse condition than the others and half of them about to collapse from the weight. Let’s get floor-to-ceiling bookcases built into three of the living room walls.” “Hold off a second,” he said. “You’re talking about a job only a master carpenter can do, which’ll cost us your arm and my leg,” and she said “Probably, because I’d want them to look good. But I’d think they’d increase the value of the house by as much as we spent to build them, so in the long run it’d be as if we got them for practically nothing.” He said “Where are we going? I like our house and want to live in it for many more years. And most people don’t give a damn about bookcases or even want them for the ten or so books they own. Especially built-in ones that’d cost plenty to have removed and then to repair the damage to the walls they made.” “Would you object to my getting an estimate?” and he said “Go ahead. Doesn’t cost anything. Get two.” After they were built—“I know you’ll eventually come around to think ‘How did we ever do without them?’”—he said “There was a lot of noise around here for a while and the house was a mess longer than I thought I could take, but the bookcases are beautiful. Matthew was expensive but he did a great job.” “Now we just have one small additional expense,” she said. “I want to hire a graduate student from my department to help me shelve all our books by category and in alphabetical order.” “I can do it with you,” and she said “You have your own work to do, and I don’t know of any grad student who couldn’t use the money.” “How much you thinking of paying them?” and she said “fifteen an hour.” “That’s a lot. Why not get an undergrad?” and she said “Graduate students seem to appreciate books more and don’t handle them as roughly. So, my dear, no more looking all day for a book. You want a particular Bernhard novel, and you haven’t left it in the car, you go to ‘B-E’ on the fiction shelves. You want his memoir, then ‘B-E’ in the bio section. Poetry, its own section. Philosophy, art and travel books, literary criticism, etcetera — maybe even the classics — each separate. My French books, literature and criticism, in both languages, will take up one entire wall and probably continue into my study. For your published books, a row of their own on the top shelf there, with room for more.” He said “I’d rather not show them off like that in such a prominent place. Better, I keep my work in the old bookcase in our bedroom.” A video camera. She wanted them to buy one about twenty years ago and he didn’t want to and now regrets not having any videos of her other than a short part of one a friend gave them that’s around someplace, and of the kids when they were growing up. “You’re being unreasonable again,” she said, and he said “When was the last time? All right. But I just don’t see the point to them. We’ll never watch them after the first couple of times, and to me they’re so self…self…self-something. ‘Look at the mundane things I’m doing.’ ‘Watch me leaving the house holding Maureen by the hand.’ ‘See Martin and Gwen smile for the birdie and kiss for the camera?’ That kind of stuff.” “Even if my parents want to buy us one?” and he said “Like the microwave oven they also offered to buy us. It was generous of them, but I don’t want either gift or think we need them. We have enough things as it is.” “I won’t fight it,” she said. “It isn’t important enough to. Besides, I don’t like to be on camera myself.” “Same here, so what are we arguing about?” “The kids, perhaps. Years from now they might want to know why we don’t have any videos of them and us.” “We have photographs,” he said. “Envelopes and envelopes of them, we also don’t look at. But they take the place of videos, I’d think.” “I still feel you’re making a mistake. We’d use the camera sparingly. Birthdays. Once a summer the two kids in front of The Bubbles at Jordon Pond House. Like that. You don’t ever have to pose for it. Maybe you’ll change your mind on getting one.” Their first minivan. She thought they needed a bigger car for the family and all the things they take to Maine that they don’t send UPS. He said “Doesn’t seem like a bad idea. But I don’t want to own two cars. After we buy the van, we’ll sell the Citation.” “But this way each of us would have a car,” and he said “Insurance for both? Repairs? Getting them tested for emissions every other year? We’ll manage with one.” She looked into buying the van. Visited auto showrooms. Spoke to people they knew who had vans. Consumer Reports and other magazines. Even stopped people at shopping centers who were getting in or out of their vans and asked them what they thought of this particular model. “How is it on gas? Is the middle row as easy as they say to take out?” “This is what I’ve come up with,” she said to him. “The Plymouth Voyager seems to be the one we should buy. It’s been making them the longest, handles like a smaller vehicle, and is the most fuel-efficient and trouble-free. And I know the dealership in the area that offers the lowest price and best warranty. If you’d like, we can buy one this weekend. Any particular color? Though I’ve been warned, for reasons not entirely clear to me — something to do with day and night and other drivers’ visibility — to stay away from the very dark and very light.” “You choose,” he said. “I’ll go along with anything you say.” “God, you’re being so agreeable about it, and have been from the start,” and he said “Well, while I sat on my fat ass, you did all the research and legwork, so it’s the least I can be. Maybe it’s the new me, though don’t bet on it.” The first house they bought. She said “I think the ideal place for us to live is Mount Washington. It has lots of trees and hills and open spaces and is just a fifteen-minute drive to work. It’s considered liberal politically, has almost an even mix of Jew and Gentile, and many educators and arts and crafts people have homes there. But what’s most important, and no doubt this is so because of some of the things I mentioned, it has the best elementary school in the city. The two disadvantages are that the middle and high school that serve that community aren’t very good. If they stay as bad as the test scores and graduation rates and some people I’ve spoken to say they are, then when Rosalind’s about six months away from entering middle school, we’ll put the house on the market and look for one in this very attractive area I’ve got my eye on in Baltimore County, a few miles north of Mount Washington. It’s less populated and more rustic, is close to 83 so takes only five minutes more to get to work, doesn’t have the same comfortable mix of Jew and Gentile and is almost uniformly white, which I don’t like, so it’s not as liberal politically. But the middle and high schools for it are supposed to be as good as any in the state, and it has a more than adequate elementary school for Maureen’s last three years in one and I hear it’s improving every year, so by the time we move there it could be as good as Mount Washington’s.” His teaching. She encouraged him to apply for a college teaching job that had opened up in Baltimore. He was interviewed, was offered the job but reluctant to give up his apartment and move down there without her. She said he had to have a full-time job if he eventually wanted to get married and have children, not that she was proposing to him, and there were very few well-paying creative writing teaching jobs in New York for writers with little recognition and no advanced degrees, no matter how many books and stories they’ve published. “Take the job. You don’t know how lucky you are they made you the offer. It’s a three-year contract, you can always leave in a year or two, but I wouldn’t advise you to unless it’s for a much better position. You don’t want to get a reputation in academia of breaking a contract for nothing else or something less. And I’ve checked the train schedules between Baltimore and New York. They run almost every hour and the fares aren’t that expensive because they’re subsidized by the government, so we can still be together every weekend. If you can arrange to hold only afternoon classes and none on Friday, we’ll have even longer weekends together, and from time to time I’ll drive or train down to you.” “All right, you convinced me, but what am I going to do not seeing you those four other days?” and she said “You’ll get your teaching work done, to free up your weekends with me, and write more.” St. John. She said at dinner — it was soon after his fall semester began—“When’s your spring break?” He said he didn’t know and she looked at the school calendar on the refrigerator and said “Good; March. Let’s spend a week of it on St. John.” “Where’s that?” and she said “The Caribbean; the Virgin Islands. I read a travel article in the Times about it. Rosalind will be a year and a half then, old enough to fly. For not too much money we can stay in a cabin at a campground on Cinnamon Bay. I’ll show you; the photos of it are gorgeous. But you have to promise you’ll try snorkeling. It’s one of my main reasons to go there; for me to get back to it and for you to start doing it, and I know you’ll love it.” “Sounds okay to me. Late winter in paradise? Seeing a place I’ve never been and learning something new? What could be better?” She arranged everything: flights, ferries, living arrangements. Morning after they got there she rented snorkeling equipment for herself, wanted to rent for him, but he said “Don’t; it’ll be a waste of money. I know I’ll never be able to breathe underwater through that tube.” “Practice in shallow water,” and he said “No. I’ll swallow water even there and choke.” Last day they were there she said “I’m going to make a threat I know I can’t carry out. We’re not leaving this island till you try to snorkel at least once.” He used her mask and tube, caught on to it quickly, snorkeled for about two hours and didn’t want to come out of the water. “All those little fishies; they really do swim in front and alongside of you. What a dope I was not to do it the first day.” “Oh, I’m so pleased you like it. To be honest with you, your sitting on the beach with Rosalind for five days and taking her back to the cabin for naps, gave me more time to snorkel and that made the vacation for me. But you should listen to me more. Sometimes I know better than you what will make you happy.” “From now on,” he said. “Just watch me.” The QE2. “Are you kidding? Who’s got that kind of money?” and she said “You’re not listening. I said we’d only go if we get standby. That’s half the regular fair and practically nothing for Rosalind but the crib rental and all-day nursery. All day, Martin. Think of the time we’d have to loll and laze around and even get some work in. We’ll know a few weeks before the Queen sails if we got it. They told me that at that time of the sailing season, east to west standby is almost a sure thing. By chance we don’t get it, we’ll fly British Airways, which I’ll also make reservations for. They’re run by the same company, so the deal is we won’t lose our deposit for whichever one we don’t use.” Or maybe she said there was some agreement between the two companies and they only had to pay for their plane tickets once they learned they didn’t get on the QE2. He knows she arranged it some way where it wouldn’t cost them any extra money. Anyway, they got it and loved the trip home. Great weather, smooth crossing, they both got work done — she, the galleys of a book she translated; he, the first and second drafts of a short story he wrote by hand in one of the ship’s quieter lounges and which turned into an enormous novel that took four years to write — lots of reading of books from the ship’s library, movies, wine was cheap, good food, and once they worked things out after a furious argument they came on board with—“You made me cry,” she said, “and hate you”; “Funny,” he said, “but I could never say that about you, but I know why you could to me”—more daytime lovemaking than usual. And every morning she was delighted and amused that they got an hour added to the day. Converting the cellar of their second house to a playroom. “You’re planning to break through the walls to make windows? Cover the dirt floor with cement and linoleum? You’re talking big money for something that isn’t necessary. Leave it as it is, just for storage. Each kid already has her own bedroom. What more do they need?” “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it all,” she said. “Contractor; builders. You won’t have to do anything but make sure we’ve enough money in the checking account to cover it. I’m also having the room heated and soundproofed. That way, if the kids want to have sleepovers for ten friends or play loud music downstairs, they can.” “Wouldn’t it be cheaper and simpler for us to limit their sleepovers to three to four girls in their bedrooms, and tell them that as a common courtesy, and also for them a lesson in civility, to keep the music volume relatively low?” and she said “No.” Rosalind’s baby photos. Gwen wanted a professional photographer to take them when Rosalind was around six months old. Six months seems right. She has little hair in the photos and by the time of her first birthday party, which Gwen and he took pictures of, she had hair halfway down her neck. A photography studio must have got their name and address from the hospital Rosalind was born in and mailed them the ad. “We get two large prints of the photo we like best, and six wallet-sized ones, all for forty dollars, and get to keep the contact sheet for ten dollars more. My folks would love to have one of the large prints and we’ll frame the other.” “I hate those professionally done photographs,” he said. “They always look fake, too perfect, with their phony backdrops and lighting, and the babies never look real. And you know they’ll give you the big sales pitch to buy more, and that you won’t be able to fight them off,” and she said “I promise I’ll hold the line to the least expensive package we sign up for. I’m not a patsy, you know. And it’ll be fun watching her interact with the camera.” It was fun. Rosalind loved the attention and became something of a ham. The photographer got expressions out of her — wily, funny, charming, coquettish, serious, pensive, playful, and others — they never saw before, or not all at one sitting. They hung the framed photo on the walls of their three bedrooms — Baltimore apartment and both houses — and her folks loved the one they gave them. “We should have ordered three large prints,” he said, “for how much more would it have cost us? The third one for my mother, which I also would have got framed, as we did for your parents.” He doesn’t know why they didn’t get a professional photographer for Maureen when she was that age. Money again, probably, but he never suggested it to Gwen and she must just never have thought of it. The osteopath. He had painful back spasms that went on for two weeks. “I don’t want to see our doctor about it. He’ll recommend a specialist, who’ll send me through all sorts of tests. It’ll go away by itself.” She told him about the osteopath who cured a friend’s Bell’s palsy in two visits, while her regular doctor said there wasn’t much he could do and her paralysis wouldn’t start to go away for three months and a complete cure could take a year, and he said “I’m glad for her, but it’s not for me. Acupuncturists, chiropractors, osteopaths, vitamin therapists, Chinese herbalists, macrobiotic dieticians. You name it and I or one of the women I’ve known has done it, and they’re all quacks.” “You’re being stubborn and ridiculous again and saying what you know you don’t believe. But all right; suffer.” After another week of it, but now where he couldn’t even stand or sit up straight, she said “You either go to the osteopath or I drag you to the doctor. I’ve gone online about it. Most people with your problem claim much better and faster success with it than any kind of traditional medicine. And no surgery or medication’s involved, so what do you have to lose? Try it just once?” The osteopath wanted to put him on a couple of machines in his office. “I don’t want anything like that. They’ll take too long and they look like remedial artifacts from a century ago that in no way can help me. I’ll be frank with you. I didn’t want to see you but my wife insisted I come. She did some research on it and what she came up with is that just your working your hands on me like a massage therapist does is the treatment that gets the best results.” The osteopath had him sit on an exam table, got behind him and grabbed his head firmly with both hands—“Don’t be alarmed if you hear a couple of loud cracks”—and gave it two quick twists. “Miracle,” he said to Gwen when he got back to the waiting room. “I can stand up straight and walk normally again and pain’s all gone. And look; I can wrap my arms around you without any part of me hurting,” and he wrapped his arms around her. “How come you know how to fix everything up?” First time they went to France together. It was his idea — he’d wanted to go there with her the June after they first met, but didn’t have the money to. As with the week’s vacation on St. John they had with Rosalind more than two years later, she took care of everything: travel, lodging, itinerary. Big cities like Nice and Marseilles but also small towns and chapels and museums in the south he’d never heard of. Day after they got to France, she took him to an outdoor food stand in Paris that was famous for its onion soup, she said. “The workers and farmers used to warm themselves up at night when the old wholesale food market was here. Now it’s strictly for tourists like us in the day, but it’s still supposed to be the best in the city.” She translated the sign for him. The soup had two prices: one for sitting at a table under a tent and the other for standing at a counter. “Let’s get it standing up,” he said. “It’s the same-sized bowl, you say, for half the price.” “It gets too sloppy, eating it that way,” she said. “And we’re in no rush, and I want to sit after all our walking this morning.” “We can sit on a park bench, after. — All right. But maybe we should get one bowl between us, sitting down, because it seems awfully high for a small bowl of onion soup in not the fanciest surroundings, no matter how good it might be. Then, if we don’t particularly like it, or I don’t, we wouldn’t have ordered two.” “What am I going to do with you?” she said. “If you’re to enjoy our month in France, and I’m to enjoy it with you, you’ll have to be much freer with your cash. Face it; things are more expensive here and the dollar’s down.” “Okay, two soups standing,” and she said “No. You stand and I’ll sit.” “Okay,” he said, “we both sit, but I hope they give us a roll or slice of bread or two with it, because this is our lunch.” “You have to be kidding if you think this is our lunch. What we’ll do, to compromise, though I wish you hadn’t forced me to, is get two bowls at the counter. Then, in about an hour, we’ll go to a sit-down bistro or bar for lunch.” She ordered two soups. “No bread?” and she said “If you’d look you’d see it’s in the soup, so please don’t ask for it.” After two spoonfuls and a chunk of grated cheese on top, he said “I’m being honest here; I really don’t think it’s very good. The cheese, yes. But I’ve tasted much better French onion soup in New York and at places that weren’t even famous for it.” “You’re lying,” she said. “To win the argument or prove me wrong or spoil any pleasure I might have in eating the soup. Or I don’t know why, but there it is. You and I have the same soup from the same tureen and oven. And I’ve had onion soup gratinée about a half-dozen times here — once, when it was still in the old market — and its quality has always been the same: great. You’re just ticked off about the price. Admit this one little thing to me and you’ll make me think I haven’t made a mistake coming to France with you.” “All right,” he said. “Maybe it is good. Maybe it is the price. I’m not completely sure, but it sounds right. You didn’t make a mistake coming to France with me and I’ll try from now on not to be so cheap or penny-pinching or money conscious, or whatever I’m being: tight! But you know, I’ve only had my teaching job a year. Before that — I’m giving you my excuse — it was more than ten years of not having much dough. You can say I haven’t quite adjusted yet to a full-time decent-paying job, and with a two-thousand-plus raise for the next academic year, no less.” “I guess there’s something to what you say,” she said. “Let me think about it. Meanwhile, please, no more chintziness. Trust me, my sweetheart, I’m doing my best, as I did with our airfares and hotels, to keep our expenses down. But I’m not, for both of us, going to do it to the point of ruining our trip.” “Got ya,” he said, “completely. And as you saw, I had some more soup. It’s actually quite good. And the top layer — must be some kind of Swiss — is the best I’ve ever had.” “I’m not going to say anything to that. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.” The farmhouse. The cottage she started renting in Maine ten years ago was up for sale. They wanted to buy it, but that would mean not buying a house in Baltimore. “So what are we going to do next summer?” he said. “I’ll come up with something,” she said. She tried all the rental agents in the area. There were very few houses available for an entire summer and what was available they couldn’t afford. “We’re really screwed,” he said. “I’ve come to love it here and would hate not coming back.” “Don’t worry,” she said. “We still have two weeks left and I haven’t tried everything.” She placed an ad in the local weekly — checked the wording with him first — that said “Writer and translator, husband a university professor and wife trained to be one, with a small child, another baby on the way, four well-behaved scratchless cats of the same Siamese family (mother and brood), would like to rent house in quiet, appealing surroundings in Blue Hill Bay area next summer for two to three months, and, if it’s a good fit for both parties, for as many summers after that.” “Perfect,” he said. “Every word and comma. And honest, intelligent, personable and informative. Add that we’re long-time summer residents here, and the responses should pour in. I know I’d be interested.” They got one call. She was out. “You should probably speak to my wife,” he said. “She handles everything like this,” and the woman said “Why? I’ve got you, and you can tell her what I’ve said. My husband and I thought we were done with all the problems of renting the farmhouse and would use it only when we needed to get away from each other. But your notice intrigued us. For one thing, we feel that intellectuals make the most responsible and congenial tenants. For another, we do a smattering of writing ourselves. Topical articles for the Weekly Packet and the Sedgwick Historical Society, nothing academic or of literary value that could gain us a Pulitzer Prize. Tell me what you two do.” He told her. “Talking to you and hearing your adoring description of your wife, I like you both already and my husband will too. The farmhouse sits atop a hill, is nice and isolated, old, somewhat run-down, has sloping floors you’ll at first have trouble maneuvering, and there’s a bit of a mouse problem, which your cats will take care of in days. But so we don’t get too many complaints about the condition of the house and the noise the wild turkeys make as they strut through the property at dawn, we keep the rent cheap. Come and take a peek, and while you’re here, we’ll all have tea.” Second summer they rented it, Gwen bought a new double bed for them, had all the rooms painted and new screens put in, and a heating stove installed in the living room for the chillier days. “We might as well have rented a luxury house for what all this is costing us,” and she said “Everything we’re adding will make the place cozier for us, even the paint job, which will cover all the smutched mosquitoes on the ceilings and walls.” A few summers later, while Emma and Tom, their landlords, were over for dinner, she asked them if it’d be possible to have a screened-in porch built for next year. “I didn’t talk this over with Martin — you’re about to see his surprise — but we’d go in for half of it. If we stop renting here, and I don’t know when that could ever be. We love the place and the house is now in such great shape, other than for the floors — the porch, like the heating stove and washer and dryer, will be yours.” Emma looked at Tom, he nodded, and she said “It’s all right with us, dear. We’d do anything to keep you on as tenants, and of course you’re talking of a very simple porch.” “What were you thinking of?” he said to Gwen later. “Wasn’t putting in new appliances and stuff enough? Suppose we can’t come back here anymore, for some reason?” and she said “And what could that be? One of us dying? The other, I’d hope, would continue to rent the house with the children till they were grown up. I realize it was unfair of me to spring it on you like that. It just came, and I’m usually not that impulsive. But just picture those magnificent sunsets and far-off storms and rainbows we’d see from the porch without being bothered by bugs. ‘Pre-dinner drinks and hummus and cheese on the porch, anybody?’ Come on; it’d be a terrific addition. And we’ve gotten away all these years with rent that’s half what a comparable place would be, not that we’d ever find another spot so beautiful and private.” Their fifteenth or sixteenth summer there, five years after Tom died, Emma told them that after they leave at the end of August she was going to renovate and winterize the house. New kitchen and bathroom and windows and floors. A furnace to replace the one that conked out thirty years ago. The foundation jacked up to make the house level. “Been thinking of doing it a long time so I can turn it into a year-rental and maybe even get a tax break out of it. I may even live there myself awhile and rent my house for the summer. Would you be interested?” and he said “Afraid not; too close to the road. Do you agree, Gwen?” and she said “Unfortunately, yes.” Later he said to her “What are we going to do now?” and she said “Same thing we did last time. Speak to friends and rental agents. Tack up notices in libraries and bookstores and wherever there’s a bulletin board. And place an ad in the two local weeklies, the Packet and the one that’s for Deer Isle.” I wish we still had the old ad,” he said. “We only have a few weeks, and look how fast it worked,” and she said “One call. But a good one. And what would we use of it: ‘small child and a second on the way’?” She checked the wording with him again. “As usual, it’s perfect,” he said. “though this time maybe add we’ve been dependable renters up here for nearly thirty years and will provide references.” They got a few leads and phone calls. All the houses rented for three to four times what they were paying Emma. “Who knew it’s become the in-place to summer?” he said. “I understand people even see celebrities dining in Blue Hill and sailing in at the yacht club there. Nobody we’d recognize, but celebrities nevertheless. Maybe we should think of a coastal area farther north in Maine or even renting in another state. Vermont,” and she said “Never. This will always be our summer destination. You feel that too, don’t you?” They got a house on Cape Rosier they could afford to rent for five weeks. “What do you want,” he said, “July or August?” and she said “Which month is hotter? But then I’d hate to return home a month before school begins, if we choose July.” During their two summers there — the second for six weeks: last half of July and almost all of August — she spent a lot of time looking for a house to buy or a small piece of land to build a house on. “You know, I hate to be so cold-blooded about it,” she said. “But with the real-estate market crashing, this could be our best chance.” She even got architectural plans for a guesthouse a friend of hers had built on Mount Desert Island and which she said wouldn’t be that expensive. “Like our first cottage, it’s just wood; no insulation or fireplace or cathedral ceiling or cellar or even a crawlspace. It’d be ideal for us, now that the kids are out and who’ll probably only visit us for a week or two, though of course more if they want to. One bedroom and a sleeping loft; bathroom, combined kitchen and dining and living room. And a deck with a shower on it to spray your tootsies before you come in, though we could save on that because I guess it’s for sand and we’ll never be able to afford a place near the shore.” She also got the plans for a shed in the back for one of them to write in. The other can use the bedroom, she said. “It’d be what we like: simple and compact and attractive, and it’d be fun bumping into each other ten times a day. We could even get the same kind of heating stove for it we had in the farmhouse. It worked beautifully. Or I should email Emma, and if she’s not using it in the renovated house and didn’t throw it out, get it and store it in the barn here.” She looked at the houses and land by herself. Maybe twice he went with her. “I know how you hate looking at property,” she said; “it can be a bore. But if something looks promising — and I’m serious about finding a house or land this or next summer — you’ll have to see it,” and he said “When that time comes and the price seems fair to you and you think we should buy it — well, you’ve been right on just about everything else in our lives and I’ve been too cautious, so I’ll go along with anything you say. I’ll even put that in writing.” “Don’t talk silly. And I won’t make any decision like that unless you agree to it.” “In the meantime,” he said, “we have a nice place here for five weeks, and if we like, six weeks next summer, and possibly the summer after that, another week more. And if it ever comes up for sale — they’ve given hints — it won’t come cheap. But by then we might have enough money to buy it, or we’d put up most and maybe your dad could loan us the rest.” Doctors. She got her Baltimore obstetrician through her New York obstetrician. Their Baltimore general practitioner through her Baltimore obstetrician. Their Baltimore dentist and ophthalmologist and optician and the kids’ pediatrician through their Baltimore general practitioner. So what’s he saying? That though he’d been living in Baltimore for two years before she moved down there, she got them all. “I asked Dr. Vogel who does he go to for his teeth? We’ll need a dentist here unless we want to go to my regular one in New York for a checkup and cleaning twice a year and every time a tooth hurts.” “You’re right. I haven’t had my teeth looked at and cleaned for almost two years. And it’s stupid of me, because I now have insurance for it through the school.” “How’d I get Dr. Vogel?” she said. “I asked Dr. Nancy for the G.P. she goes to. I figured, one doctor taking care of another and her husband, who’s also a doctor; he’d have to be good. We need one if we’ll be living mainly in Baltimore for at least the next few years. And you should get a complete physical. When was your last?” and he said “Probably not since I was a kid and my mother took me to Dr. Baselitch in Brooklyn once a year. But I don’t need one. I’m healthy; I’m fine. If I ever do get that sick where I need to see a doctor, I’ll go to yours.” “It’s not as easy as that. He’d never take you if you weren’t his patient. Listen, I don’t want you to argue with me on this. Vogel says he has room for you if you come in for a checkup now. So I’ve made an appointment for you on a day I know you don’t have office hours or teach. Wouldn’t you feel stupid if something terrible happened to your health that could have been averted with an annual checkup?” “Sure, but nothing bad’s going to happen to me for the next thirty years, although I promise to see a doctor before that time’s up.” “I know you’re healthy,” she said, “and you take good care of yourself. But I want to keep you that way, just as you should feel the same about me,” and he said “I do; what do you think? Okay, you’re looking out for me. I appreciate it. Maybe, for the physical after this one, we can have ours on the same day and take Rosalind with us and have lunch out after. Or you and Rosalind can come with me for this one and we’ll have lunch after. What time did you make it for?” Twenty Stories. When she was pregnant with Maureen in Maine, she said “I’ve got the time and I’m not working on anything right now, so I’d like to assemble your next collection from stories that have never been in book form. You can give me as many as you want, but I get to select them and what order they fall in. It has to be my collection. Not the dedication — that should go to Rosalind and whatever we name the new one — but in things like signing off on the cover and even the print. Do you agree to the terms?” and he said “For another book that previously wasn’t there? Sure.” She chose twenty stories from about sixty he gave her to read, most of which had been in magazines or were coming out in them, and also the title: Twenty Stories by Martin Samuels. “There were five others I liked as much as the ones I picked and I would have included them. But twenty’s a better number and more memorable title for a collection; not too many, not too few, and no hyphen.” He couldn’t get a literary agent or publisher interested in the collection for more than three years. “I don’t know why,” he said. “It’s my best and also my favorite, and not just because you put it together, though that helped.” “I don’t feel I chose wrong,” and he said “You didn’t. You also made it my most diverse collection.” Then a small university press accepted it but wanted to cut it down to fifteen stories. She said “Hold out for twenty. They’ll agree to it. Tell them your wife, a professor of literature whose principle concentration is the contemporary short story — you don’t have to say it’s French and that I’m an adjunct assistant professor — worked hard at compiling the collection — use that word. I know I’m being maddeningly dictatorial about all this — not only giving you orders and no say but telling you what to tell them — but this collection’s special to me, so say your marriage is in jeopardy if you remove any of the stories or change the order they’re in. They’ll know you’re being facetious, but it might help persuade them. Also, that you want to see the book cover they have in mind and the design of the book and have the first right of approval of them. I think that’s the legal term.” “That isn’t done ever unless you’re a big-shot literary agent with tremendous clout or a writer making millions for them.” In Maine again, at the farmhouse a few weeks before the book’s publication date, she said a woman she knew in the French department at grad school gave up trying to find a tenure-track teaching position in New York and became a cultural affairs writer for Newsweek and also does occasional book reviews for it. “Evelyne’s specialty, of course, is all things French, as a writer and reviewer. But I saw some time back that she reviewed a new British novel. I want to send her a copy of Twenty Stories. I won’t tell her my part in it. I’m sure she’ll like it — our tastes were remarkably similar — and it might inspire her to review it, but without my suggesting she do it. I think it’s best when they come up with the idea themselves.” “Newsweek magazine? A review of a story collection by an almost complete literary unknown from a small university press in Baton Rouge? No chance,” and she said “What do we have to lose?” “One of my ten author copies, and I’m already down to three,” and she said “So we’ll buy more. Or you’ll ask the press to send it. No, she might not connect the name and will disregard the book. Chances are better if it comes directly from me with a personal note. That I’m teaching, living in Baltimore but still have my old apartment in New York, married to the writer, two children, and okay, this is our newest offspring…something, but I’ll work it out. I’ll send it off today.” The woman called a week later, thanking her for the book, saying it was a fast read and several of the stories were funny, the rape story and what seemed like an AIDS story very disturbing, and that she liked the collection enough to see what she could do to review it for the magazine. “No promises, but keep your fingers crossed. When you’re in New York next and hubby will look after your daughters, let’s you and I get together for a long overdue lunch. I have a lot to tell you and you were always an interested and broad-minded listener.” It was a week later. He’d just come back from the Blue Hill library with his mother. Gwen was on the second floor of the farmhouse. She must have heard the car and went to the room he worked in and raised the window screen and stuck her head outside and shouted “Martin, Martin, I have the most wonderful news. It’s in. We did it. Newsweek—not Evelyne, so even better, for less possible taint of cronyism, but a regular book reviewer — is doing the review. They’re sending up a photographer from Portland this week to photograph you. Oh my darling, I’m so happy for you. I’ll be right down to hug you.” His mother said “Newsweek magazine. You’re really getting up in the world. Your father would have liked that.” The photographer wanted some ideas where to photograph him. “Somehow, backdrops of stunted trees and blueberry fields with rocks sticking out of them don’t do it for me, and to be honest, the house is kind of shabby.” Gwen suggested the shore. “People always look good with the ocean and a beautiful sky behind them.” They drove to it. The photo that ran with the review showed him sitting on a big boulder about ten feet out in the water. “Is there some way you can get out there without soaking your sneakers and socks?” the photographer asked him. “I’ll carry them,” he said, “or just photograph me barefoot. That’d look more normal, surrounded by water,” and Gwen said “No bare feet, sweetheart. You’ll hate me for saying this, but it isn’t dignified for an author’s photo in a major newsweekly.” The photograph made him look good. Thinner, no stomach bulge showing, his hair thicker and darker. He remembers sucking in his stomach when the photographer was snapping pictures, and stiffening his upper arms so they’d look muscular in the short-sleeved polo shirt. “What a fake I am,” he later told Gwen. “Why can’t I let myself look like I look?” “You did fine. And who knows if the photo they use won’t be one where he caught you off-guard, so you’ll get your wish.” That was a while ago. Fifteen years. He does the math in his head. Eighteen. He supposes it could be called a good review. At least positive. Nothing bad said but nothing laudatory. “Fast pace and dialog,” he remembers. And the word “quirky.” Either for several of the stories or some of the writing or maybe even some of the main characters. An appealing and clearly written mix, the reviewer said, of eros, thanatos, deep feeling and snippets of humor. And that this book of interrelated stories could have been called an unchronological novel of self-contained chapters, a form, the reviewer said, that had become prevalent the last ten years. The first printing of fifteen hundred copies sold out in a week because of the review, the editor said. The book went into a second printing, the only book of his that had, of a thousand copies, and is still in print. New Year’s Eves. He thinks it was four years ago near the end of December that she asked him “What do we have planned for New Year’s Eve?” and he said “Nothing; you?” “For a change, let’s go to a really good restaurant. Will you let me take care of it? The kids are probably going to their own parties, but we can eat early if they want to come too.” She made reservations for the two of them at an expensive restaurant. “I don’t know,” he said, looking at the menu. “Why don’t you choose both entrées? Whatever you pick, I know I’ll like. And you know more about wine than I, so you choose that too.” The next year she asked him again and he said “Nothing. You know me, I’d be very content to stay home and uncork a terrific bottle of champagne. And maybe get fancy take-out from Graul’s or Eddie’s or that Persian restaurant you like so much and a movie we both want to see.” She said “Those we can do anytime. How about this year we go to a concert or play? But good seats — I’m sure the kids, like last year, will have their own things to do — and dinner in a restaurant after. We’ll have a glass of champagne there and of course a good red wine. I won’t drink that much, though. I want you to have a really good time, so I’ll drive us home.” “Suits me,” he said. “Then when we get home we can have some more champagne.” Year after that she said “Got any ideas for New Year’s Eve? There are no parties we’ve been invited to, and I doubt I’d want to go to one anyway. They’re always such drags,” and he said “You’ve done such a great job making plans for us the last few years, why don’t you decide? Although, think you’ll be feeling up to going out?” “Right now I do. We’ll see at the time. It’s not always necessary to make reservations. Even at the last minute I’ll find us a place if we don’t stay home,” and he said “No, let’s go out. Let’s have fun.” She chose the restaurant. He sat beside her at the table so he could help feed her. “You don’t have to,” she said. “I can manage,” and he said “I know you can, but I want to.” She studied the menu and said “Food’s a bit pricey. You don’t mind?” and he said “Why would I mind? It’s New Year’s Eve.” “Since you’re the one who’s going to drink,” she said, “you choose the wine. I’ll just have water and maybe tea, and what you don’t drink, we’ll take home. But don’t drink too much, okay? Because you no longer have a fill-in driver.” “If I order the least expensive bottle of red, will you think I’m being cheap?” and she said “I’m sure all the wine is good here, and I never would anyway.” The kids were out of town, though had been with them a few days before and after Christmas. Babies. A month before they married, she said “It’s my optimal fertile period, so let’s try conceiving a baby now.” “So you’re actually going through with the marriage?” and she said “If we’re successful, late September or early October are ideal times for having a child — not too hot — and then for lots of years later, birthday parties.” But he already went into that. She on her shins with her rear end to him and telling him to stay in as long as he can after. Same thing with Maureen? Same. Last two weeks of December. This time Bach. The procreative Partita Number 2 for Unaccompanied Violin. Nursery. She did some research and visited several nurseries in New York and chose one Rosalind would go to for three hours every weekday morning while Gwen was on fellowship and he was on leave for a year. “That’ll give us enough time to get something done,” and he said “Plenty, and then later, to enjoy ourselves and maybe work some more.” Rosalind’s first movie. Gwen said “There’s a movie at the Charles I want to see,” and he said “So go. I’ll stay home with Baby.” She said “Let’s all go together,” and told him how they’d do it. The theater was the only foreign film house in Baltimore. It was still a single-screen then. Rosalind was in a padded baby carrier that was like a small duffel bag with two cloth handles. She was only a few months old and slept through the entire movie. If she woke up, or even stirred but wasn’t going back to sleep immediately, he’d already designated himself as the one to take her to the lobby till she was asleep again, and Gwen would later tell him what he’d missed. The seat next to hers was too narrow to put the carrier lengthwise against the back, so she set it on the floor. “Not too dirty and cold down there?” and she said “I checked. She’ll be all right. And she’s covered.” They bought a medium-sized bag of popcorn, with no butter on it because it made their fingers greasy, and she held it while they watched the movie. “I’ll take that off your hands if you’re tired of holding it,” and she said “It’s okay. You’re always doing things for me. Have some more.” The movie was Brazilian or Argentinean or Chilean — anyway, South American — had the word “case” in its title—A Special Case? An Official Case? — and was a contemporary historical political drama of people — opponents of the government — being picked off the streets by party thugs, shoved into cars and never seen again. He thinks he has that right. The police state finally ends and some of those who disappeared are released, or something good at the end happens. He knows they both thought the movie powerful. Why’d he bring all that up and in such detail? To show them some more together and how she handled so many things for them — well, he already said that, and he for her sometimes too, and the two of them also just having a good time. So what else? All those languages she knew. French she became fluent in as an undergraduate, Italian and German and a little Spanish she studied while going for her Ph.D. Russian and Polish she learned from her parents. He loved hearing her speak one foreign language or another, but usually French, when she was on the phone. When they went to Germany with Rosalind in ’85, he didn’t know that she knew German and he was the one who ordered the food for them in the restaurants and asked directions on the street. He had two years of German in college and brushed up on it before they left for Europe and he also knew some Yiddish from hearing his folks speak a little of it at home. But she corrected his German once when they were in a café in Munich, or maybe it was when he was buying tickets at the modern art museum there, and he said “Wait a minute. You speak German too?” and she said “I had to pass a test in it to get my doctorate — that or Italian, and for some unaccountable reason I was better in German — but my proficiency in it is mostly in reading.” “How come I never knew?” he said. “Now, if it’s possible, I’m even more impressed by you.” Anything else? Someone knocked on his classroom door. He was standing at one end of the long seminar table, about to write some proofreader’s marks on the blackboard and explain what they mean. He said to his students “Now who could that be?” or “Now what can that be?” and he indicated to the student nearest the door to open it, and then said “No, sit; I can do it,” and said loudly in the direction of the door “Come in.”

He reaches over to the night table for his watch and presses the button on it to light its face. But he’s holding the back side of it up and turns it over and presses the button again. Five after seven. Thought so — seven-ten, quarter after — because of the light outside. It was like that early yesterday morning when he looked at his watch. Doesn’t want to try sleeping some more and is bored with just lying in bed. Read? No. Time to get up, he supposes. Later he’ll take a long nap when the kids are out. Reaches over to the other night table on what used to be his side of the bed and turns the radio on to the Baltimore classical music station. The dial’s always set to it; he hasn’t moved it since Gwen died. At night, if they were preparing for bed, or he was going to bed before her, he’d turn on the radio to the music. He’d listen to it no matter what it was. Low, though, if it was something he didn’t like. If she didn’t like what was playing she’d say something like “Do we have to listen to that?” or “Oh, no, not another Strauss waltz” or “Sousa march.” In the morning, if they were getting up at the same time — if she was still sleeping or even just resting in bed, he wouldn’t turn the radio on — she’d ask him to switch to the public radio station for the news. She didn’t read newspapers anymore. Maybe the Book Review in the Sunday Times, but that’s about it. “I’m tired of turning the pages and seeing the same stories or daily continuations of them, but mostly ads.” For the last three years she got all her news from the radio and her computer and what he’d tell her he read in the paper that day and she might find interesting. “You’re not missing much,” he told her a number of times. A Beethoven piano sonata was on. The volume’s low because he doesn’t want to wake the kids. He sits on the edge of the bed and listens to it for about two minutes while he does some stretching exercises. It’s a late sonata, but not one of the last three. Those he’s heard so many times on records and CDs and the radio, he knows them almost by heart. Or at least knows when it’s not one of them. Maybe the “Hammerklavier,” the 26th or 29th, or whatever number it is. Why’s he so sure it’s opus 106, when he couldn’t give one of the other opuses? The “Appassionata”? Knows it’s not “Les Adieux.” Liked that one a lot once but hasn’t for years and doubts he ever will again. Too schmaltzy. No, definitely the “Appassionata.” He’d say to her now, even though he knows she didn’t, “You played this once, the ‘Appassionata,’ didn’t you?” And she’d say something like, which she said for another piece he once asked her about, “Never. Much too hard. The only Beethoven I learned to play, or let’s say, practiced, was several of the Bagatelles. Those were what my piano teacher thought I was ready for after Brahms’s Intermezzo, not that they were simple. But I never gave enough time to them, so played them quite badly.” “I’d still like to hear you play them,” he’d say, “and also the Intermezzo again. I loved it. More than anything you played. Would you do that for me one day?” and he could see her saying something like “The piano isn’t what it was. I have to get it tuned and one of the keys replaced. And I haven’t practiced those for years. I’d embarrass myself, even if the piano was in good shape. But maybe.” He turns the radio off, Not because the kids might hear. Well, that too. Beautiful as the piece is, or gets to be, he doesn’t want to listen to any music; wouldn’t care what was on, and doesn’t know when he will. He does some stretching exercises on the bed. Oh, what the hell am I exercising for? he thinks. If I hurt, I hurt, and I’ll take a couple of aspirins to relieve it. Meaning? He stretches so he won’t hurt later, after he exercises, but it’s boring and isn’t what he wants to do now. Who knows about later. He’s been going, before Gwen died, to the Y just about every other day for an hour for years, but isn’t sure if he’ll ever go back. Just doesn’t see himself there anymore. And some people he knows there will ask, and he’ll tell them and break down, and he doesn’t want that. He gets off the bed, pees, makes the bed — that, he’s always done, even before he met Gwen; can’t stand an unmade bed — brushes his teeth, flosses out a few irritating pieces, sits on the toilet. While he’s sitting, kicks one leg up twenty times — counts as he does — then the other leg twenty times, then each leg twenty times again. Why? To do something while he’s sitting here and also maybe it’ll get something started. Then he rubs his scalp briskly for about a minute, digs in deeply at the end as he rubs, scratches the back of his head so hard he draws blood. Well, so what? Finds the rubbing and scratching, which he does every morning on the toilet, but not scratching as hard as he did today, make him more wide awake faster. That what he wants? Sure; why not? Sits some more. Nothing comes or even seems to be there, but he thought, as he does every morning, he’d try. Likes to shit first thing in the morning, but should give up trying so hard to. Should try not to obsess over it and to just let it come naturally. Doesn’t, then there’s the next day, and not that day, the day after. But don’t force it. It’ll come. If it doesn’t by the end of the third day, take some milk of magnesia or mineral oil — there’s still some of Gwen’s in the refrigerator. Or mix together water and orange or grapefruit juice — she preferred cranberry — with the psyllium husk fiber she used to use once or twice a day. There’s almost a whole container of it in one of the kitchen cupboards. He was planning to throw it out, but now he won’t. Her medications, she said, made her constipated, and constipation gave her a bellyache. “I don’t like talking about it,” she once said — oh, not so long ago. Months. “Why not?” he said. “It happens to everybody, or every adult, and you and I have been through everything. I’ll do what I can to help you with it, though I don’t know what that could be. Shaking up the fiber drink for you till it’s absolutely smooth. Anything you ask me to do to make things easier and more comfortable for you.” “I still don’t like talking about it,” she said. “While I’m still able to, I’d like to deal with it myself quietly.” “My baby,” he said, “I love you, shit and all,” and she said “Please don’t talk like that, and it’s not because it’s not a joking matter. It makes me feel worse. And I’m not your baby,” and he said “I meant ‘my darling, my sweetheart.’” “Did I ever tell you about one incident with my father?” he said to her that time or another, but when they were on the same subject. “When I was living up the block from my folks? I used to make sure every night, around eleven or twelve, that he was all right in his hospital bed in their apartment.” “You told me,” she said. “I told you that if I came into his room and he’d had a bowel movement since my mother had put him to bed, and you’d know it before you got there, I’d clean him and it up?” “Yes,” she said. “I suppose most children couldn’t have done it. I doubt I could have.” “That’s okay. But did I tell you it almost always made me gag and want to throw up? But then I told myself ‘You have to get used to it. If you’re going to do it, you can’t be put off by it. It’s just shit. So stick your fingers in it once and that’ll cure you of your squeamishness,’ and I did and it worked. Didn’t gag again, neither coming into the room or taking care of him. Did it like a pro. So don’t be concerned about it with me. I’m used to it. I’ve done it. I can handle it.” And she said “I don’t want to hear anymore. If it happens, do what you have to, or what I can’t do, but please don’t talk about it,” and he said “I just thought you’d feel easier, knowing.” Feels the back of his head. Blood seems to have dried. Should remember to wipe the back of his head with a wet towel in case there’s any blood there. Doesn’t want to scare the kids. And give up. Nothing’s going to come, and he stands up and flushes the toilet. Why did he even flush? For a little pee? They get their water from a well, so he’s always trying to conserve water though they’ve never run dry except when there was an electrical outage. And look at him, still with the “we” and present tense, and he does mean Gwen and he and not his daughters. That’ll change, but he bets not for a year or more. After a number of these outages — most of them short, an hour or two, but one for four days, where he had to get their water from a neighbor — he had a generator installed that automatically turns the electricity on a few seconds after the outage. So what’s he saying? Lost track. That he didn’t want to be without water with her the last two years, that’s why he got the generator. Before, except for that four-day outage — or five, or six; he forgets, but it was unbelievably long and very hard for them — they would use candles and the fireplace and gas stove. It would even be romantic and then joyous or at least cause for cheers when the lights came back on. Because sometimes — and this is the main reason he needed the well working — after almost a week of her being constipated, she would shit several times in an hour, and even after that, most of them normal bowel movements but some so large that they stopped up the toilet when he flushed it and poured over the rim with the water and he then had to use the plunger for he doesn’t know how long to unclog it and wipe up the shit and paper and about an inch of water on the floor and give it and the toilet a good cleaning. “I’m so sorry and ashamed,” she said the first time, and he said “Don’t be. Didn’t I tell you that once? It’s not a job I like, and I for sure know it’s not one you wanted to happen, but what can we do?” The second time, after he flushed the toilet and saw the shit and paper rising to the top, he cried “Oh no-o-o-o,” and then screamed when they spilled over the rim, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” and banged his fists against the wall. She started crying. He thought “Good God, what am I doing? I’m making things worse. She could have another stroke.” He said “Okay, I’m better; I got it all out,” and told her to kick off her slippers—“Let’s try not to track up the rest of the house — and after I finish here I’ll wash them or throw them out.” Later he said he was sorry. “I swear, I swear; deeply sorry. I obviously wasn’t as adjusted to it yet as I thought. But, cleaning it up, I figured out how to avoid the toilet overflowing again when your bowel movements are that large. And I’m not blaming you for them, just saying. First of all, no paper in the toilet. After I wipe you, or you wipe yourself, we’ll put the paper into a plastic shopping bag and get rid of it in the garbage. Then I’ll get half the feces out with a kitty litter scoop into a pail of some kind with a little water in it and flush it down the other toilet. Or even less than half, but get it down to the size of a normal bowel movement, and do that a couple of times. That should do it,” and she said “I hope it works.” “It’ll work. Why shouldn’t it?” and she said “You know, with our luck.” Lets the sink water run hot. Sometimes he gets the hot water in a large plastic container from the kitchen faucet. It comes there faster, so there’s less waste. Then swishes around his wet shaving brush inside the shaving soap dish — the same cat-food tin he’s used for about the last ten years — and lathers his face and neck. New blade? The last few mornings he’s asked himself that and then thought “Tomorrow. I don’t want to bother.” And today he thinks the shave doesn’t have to be that close, for where’s he going? The lather’s disintegrating, so he starts shaving. Shaves every day. Maybe he should change that. Skip a day now and then, or maybe grow a beard. If he did, it’d come in gray. Finishes the neck and starts on the cheeks, always the right one first. Doesn’t think he’d like having a gray beard. It’d just make him look older than he looks already. Mentioned to Gwen about possibly growing one a year ago and she said “How big a beard?” and he said “Full. A goatee or anything like that wouldn’t be for me. Too foppish, and they look pasted on,” and she said “I don’t like kissing a man with a full beard. I don’t even like touching it with my hand.” “I know; it scratches your face. Lots of women say that. And it probably doesn’t feel good when I’m going down on you,” and she said “Maybe. But that was so long ago I don’t even remember if my bearded man did that to me.” “I shouldn’t have brought it up,” and she said “It’s true. It wasn’t necessary.” Does the chin and above the lip and is finished. He always did a quick shave, with very few cuts. Once did have a beard. Twice. Before he met her. Witch hazel? Don’t bother. Once in the summer and his face sweated so much from it, that he shaved it off after a few weeks. Another time, before or after the other one, it itched and he kept scratching it and pulling on the beard, something he doesn’t like to see other men do, and every so often he had to tweeze a hair that had got ingrown and hurt. That beard he kept longer. It was almost the same color and texture of his head hair — the only difference was that it had a little red in it — and he felt it made him look artistic. One person even said he looked like van Gogh, which he liked, and another like a young Pissarro, which he didn’t know what to make of, and the woman he was seeing at the time said it made him look rugged. But then he felt he was hiding behind it — he wasn’t showing his real face; this was around the same time he stopped for good combing his hair over his bald spots — and shaved it off. Shaves every day because he doesn’t want to look even slightly like a bum, which is what his father said about men who looked as if they hadn’t shaved for two or three days, and he doesn’t want to look artistic or rugged either. His father also shaved every day, even when he wasn’t going anywhere, till he got sick with a couple of diseases and couldn’t shave himself, so he’d shave him almost every morning with an electric razor. Doesn’t think he would have been able to do it with — do they still call it this? — a safety razor. His mother said, watching him once, “You can do it better than me because you’re a man and you know a man’s face. I’d be afraid.” She did, last few years of his father’s life, give him haircuts and shave the back of his neck with a special attachment on the electric razor. Sits on the bed and starts to dress. Socks from the floor. Doesn’t usually start with them, but does today. Then thinks Maybe get a fresh pair. Smells the one in his hand. No smell, but the bottom’s dirty and he must have sweated a lot in them yesterday, and he takes off the one he put on and opens the top dresser drawer. Black or white, that’s his choice. Both are all cotton, but the white’s more an athletic sock and never as tight, and takes out a pair and puts them on. Smells yesterday’s shirt at one armpit. Stinks, and he opens the bottom dresser drawer where all his shirts are. Actually, the tank tops are in the top. There are several long-sleeve T-shirts, black and navy blue and all of them cotton, and he takes out a black one because the material’s lighter and smoother than the blue, and puts it on. Opens the three middle drawers, which her things are still in, and quickly closes them. Why’d he open them? Doesn’t know. Impulse. Wasn’t looking for anything. Got a whiff of her perfume in the most middle drawer, but that wasn’t why he opened it. That’ll always be her smell, more than anything. Thought of something like that last night. Can’t imagine what he’d do if he started up with a new woman sometime and she wore that same perfume. That’s a scene for a short story. He’d say to her next time not to and tell her why. Anybody would understand. Or he wouldn’t say. He’d just fantasize. Might be nice. If he’d be seeing that woman he thinks he’d eventually be sleeping with her, that’s how it’s always been, and if she had on that perfume in bed? What’s he going into? That he’d make love with another woman? Sure, one day, he’d want to, but a long ways from today. Not a long ways from wanting to but from doing it. Hard to imagine, too. Actually, not hard at all. Naked, feeling each other, kissing, hugging, sucking, breasts, cunt, pubic hair, going down on each other, or just him on her — anything to get him excited — sticking it in? How do you first get to bed, though? You’re at either of your places and drinking and kissing and maybe feeling and one of you, as Gwen did to him, says “Think we should go to bed?” That’s all it took. After that it gets much easier, or used to. But it might never happen again with him. Not just because of the way he is now, his depression, if that’s what it is. And his predisposition to solitude — well, he was always like that a little — that might last and even, longer he cuts himself off from people, get worse. But his age, primarily, and what he’d call his wariness or even his fright at getting involved enough with someone new to make love with, and so on. “And so on” what? Other things he hasn’t thought of, and maybe not so much the ones he gave. So then what? Just jerking off for the rest of his life? Buying girlie magazines, raunchier the better? Those vacant faces in them, those beautiful bodies? Going into a convenience store — parking in front just to buy the magazine — and taking one off the rack and paying for it and getting back change? Doesn’t see himself doing that. Did before he met Gwen, once or twice a year when he wasn’t living with a woman, but never felt comfortable doing it, and now? But he’ll have to, won’t he? What other way? Subscribe? How do you, and he’d just want one issue, not one mailed to him every month. He’d keep it under some shirts in his dresser drawer, wouldn’t use it all the time, because how many times could he do it to the same nudes before he gets tired of them? But maybe the photos are so graphic now, and there are so many different nudes in each issue and a wide variety of poses, that one issue would be good for a year or so and almost every time. Because how often would he jerk off? Once a week? More likely, every other week? Has seen them in those stores. Band around them or shrink-wrapped, so you couldn’t open them at the stand. Lingerie issue. Back-to-College issue. Summer Girls. They have to be a lot more revealing than they were thirty years ago. Has a hard-on but not a full one. Not the first he’s had since she died but the first that’s come while he was awake and thinking about sex. Plays with it a little but with no thought of ejaculating. Just curious. Doesn’t get harder or larger and he didn’t think it would, and stops. Not while his daughters are still here. Think of something else. Finish getting dressed. He’s thirsty and a little hungry too. Did he eat yesterday? Knows he drank. He ate. Little. Baby carrots. A cracker. Piece of cheese. Some celery sticks. He’s not starving. And less he eats, less he’ll need to shit. Should suggest to them they take whatever they want of hers from the dresser and closets. And dishes and pots and pans and cookbooks and cutlery they might be able to use and artwork she owned before she knew him and stuff she bought after they married. Antique goose decoy on the fireplace mantel and several smaller ones of ducks around the house. Miniature Russian icon triptych her parents gave her and her first husband when they got married, but maybe that’s too valuable. Also on the mantel: two tiny porcelain figurines in a bell jar she got at a silent auction in Maine. He likes that piece. “The old couple seems so happily married and physically right for each other,” he once said to her, “I can’t think of looking at them without thinking of us,” so maybe he’ll keep that one too, and the kids move around a lot and the bell jar would be too fragile to travel. Binoculars she observed birds with from her study here and apartment they had on Riverside Drive and desk in Maine. Victorian candlestick he gave her for her birthday a half year after they met. So many things. Too many for one person living alone. Wants to clear out half the house. Furniture and linen if they need some in their cities. But senses it’s too soon for them. They even said so, so why harp on it? He knows how they feel. They feel the way he does. And he’s sure they have enough reminders of her for now. Fresh boxer shorts. The old ones he didn’t have to smell. Thinks it’s been two days, and after he zips up or just pulls up his pants if he’s been sitting on the toilet he frequently pisses or drips a little into the shorts. Pants off the chair. Nah, get your sweatpants. Be comfortable, and no pants are more comfortable, and he hangs these up on a hook in the closet and gets the sweats out and puts them on. Sneakers. Fresh handkerchief. Two ballpoint pens in one side pants pocket and memobook in the other. Doesn’t need his watch because he knows he’s not going anywhere today. Starts out of the room with his dirty clothes. His glasses. How could he have forgotten? And goes back and puts them on and goes into the kitchen and drops the clothes into the washing machine. Some of the kids’ clothes are in it and a tablecloth and dish towels. Tablecloths they should also take. Doesn’t know why Gwen had so many, because they almost always, when they had guests for dinner, used the same green and yellow one from India with matching cloth napkins. On the dryer next to the washing machine’s a note from Maureen. “Hi Daddy. We hope you slept well. We’ll be sleeping late unless you need us for anything. We’ve been meaning to tell you. We have Mommy’s cell phone if you want to start using it. It’s part of a group plan. You must know that. You’ve been paying for it for years. It allowed the three of us, when Mommy was alive, to call each other anytime of the day for free. The phone’s being recharged now in Roz’s room. But we have to warn you. It has Mommy’s voice on it. Just her saying her name when the automated voice says she’s not available and your message has been forwarded to an automated voice message machine. If you do want her phone, and we hope so because that would mean Roz and I would be able to talk to you more, we’d like to keep Mommy’s voice on it. Do you mind? We think it would be nice to hear Mommy every time we call you and the message system picks up. Love from Roz and me. Maureen.” He writes under her note “Dear Maureen. I would like to take over Mommy’s phone. I wasn’t aware of the cell phone message — I suppose I should’ve assumed so — but if you both want to keep it on, fine with me. I’d get upset hearing her speak myself. But there’s no reason that should happen unless I call the cell phone just to hear her voice, which I don’t see myself ever doing. Love, Dad.” Then thinks But what’s with this note business? He’ll tell them all this when he sees them, and tears up the note and sticks the pieces into the recycle bag next to the trash can. It’s almost full. Later he’ll stuff all the paper down in it so they won’t blow around when he brings it outside to the carport, and open up another bag by the can. Looks through the kitchen door. Could have just looked at the inside light switch by the door. Outside lights have been turned off. Now he remembers. Her mother kept giving her tablecloths, ones she brought with her from Russia and others she bought here for Gwen, and she said she didn’t have the heart to tell her she already had more than she could use. “The kids will take them,” and he said “Don’t count on it. Most are a little dowdy.” Her cameras. Two very good ones. She liked taking pictures of birds, especially hummingbirds at the various feeders if she could get her camera quick enough, and flowers and the star magnolia in bloom and their cats. Those he thinks the kids will want to take when they leave. They’re not as personal as most of the other things he mentioned, and a number of times they needed a good camera to take pictures a photo lab would turn into slides of their work. Doubts he’ll be taking pictures anymore. Took a lot of them of the kids and her, in Maine, mostly with cheap throwaway cameras. Plenty of her alone too, even though she never wanted him to, when she was still healthy. How could he not? She always looked so great in them. And those Polaroid nude shots of her — how’d he ever get her to let him? — when she was seven months pregnant with Rosalind, ones he ended up with only one good one of and she said she tore up. Maybe she didn’t and only threatened to and then forgot about it. One day he’ll look for it and the two or three others he took that time and which were too dark and blurry to see anything and would probably, if they survived, be worse now. Go through all the boxes and file drawers in her study she kept most of their photos in. They’re certainly not in any of the albums. Didn’t he think this last night? Yes, but not that they might still be around. Wishes he’d taken a few of her nude when she wasn’t pregnant. Standing facing him. Sitting in a chair like an artist model — that’s how he could have worded it to her. Lying on the bed or couch with her back or front to him. But he knows she wouldn’t have let him if he’d asked. But he should have asked. What a dope that he didn’t. “They’re Polaroids,” he would have said. “Nobody will see them but me.” “What do you want them for?” she might have said. “You have me,” and he would have said “For when I’m away.” Well, he didn’t know things would turn out like this. Her feeling, he thinks, was that her body in the pregnant photos no way resembled hers, which is why she went along with the two or three she let him take. He thinks she even said something like that. “I’m unrecognizable. Look at my breasts and stomach and from what I can see of my buttocks. Even my face is a bit bloated and my thighs seem fatter too, though I suppose everything but my breasts will go back to the way they were before.” Anyway, he doesn’t know how to use either of her cameras, or even load them. She showed him once, but he’s long forgot. I’ll never remember,” he said. “I like simple cameras.” So he’ll insist the kids take them. “They’re wasted here,” he’ll say. “And you each can use one, and it won’t take you anything to learn how. I’m sure you have friends who’ll show you. If there’s film still in the cameras, just develop them and send me the ones you think I might find interesting. I’m sure there’s none of Mom. And while we’re at it,” he’ll say, “maybe you can take back with you a lot of the photographs too. Help me to start getting rid of things.” Opens the dishwasher. Nothing in it. All the dishes and such from yesterday have been washed and put away. Good. They did everything right. Countertops even look cleaned. Not a crumb. Opens the refrigerator. Plenty of food in it in plastic containers and bowls covered by saucers and plates. He never had plastic wrap — the environment — and Gwen agreed they didn’t need it. And then the stuff that’s always in there. So, plenty for them, and if there isn’t there what they want for breakfast and lunch they can take his car and get it. He’ll give them money or say “Use the credit card you have of mine.” They’ll probably want to go for coffee at the nearby Starbucks on North Charles as they do almost every morning when they’re here together, and ask him if he wants to join them, and he’ll say “Not today and maybe not tomorrow. I don’t know when. But enjoy yourselves and use the credit card I gave you for anything you want there,” and they might say they have their own credit cards. The one they have of his is only for plane and train fares and taxis late at night and emergencies, and he’ll say “While you’re here, everything should be on me. That’s what Mommy would want for you too.” Or maybe not the last. Sleek seems to have been taken care of before they went to bed. Still plenty of kibble in his food bowl and water bowl’s full almost to the top. All the cat food on the saucer’s been eaten. They may have even given him some sliced turkey and other deli meat that was out there. He gets the saucer off the floor and washes it with the scrub side of the sponge and puts it in the dish rack by the sink. Only thing in the dish rack; not even a spoon. That’s how thorough they were, and dish rack mat’s been cleaned too. He’ll open a can of cat food — didn’t see an opened one in the refrigerator, but he might have missed it it was so crowded in there — and spoon half a can of it onto the saucer next time he sees Sleek. If the wet food’s been out there too long — a half-hour, an hour — he won’t eat it. Thinks he hasn’t seen him since yesterday, and then not much. Could he be outside? The girls wouldn’t have let him out at night intentionally. But he has a way of scooting out the door when you open it without you seeing him. And some days he lets him in and out so much he doesn’t know if he’s out or in. Gwen used to ask him “You see Sleek?” and he’d say “Cat makes me dizzy. I don’t know if the last time I saw him was when I let him in the house or let him out, I have to do both for him so much.” Maybe he’s sleeping somewhere or just keeping to himself. Sleek loved Gwen — he could say that about a cat? He swears it sometimes seemed he was looking adoringly at her — and it’s possible he knows she’s dead and misses her deeply. Sleek came into the room when she was being lifted onto the gurney by the Emergency people that last time — the door was closed till then — and sniffed at all their shoes and the wheels of the gurney and then ran out of the room and hid somewhere in the house till that evening. When she was sick in bed with the flu or a bad cold or worse or was just reading or resting, he’d lie beside her and raise a front paw with the claws out and hiss at anyone who came near her but the kids. Even him. Scratched him a few times when he got too close. “Sleek, n-o-o” she’d say, and then to him once, “Don’t worry. He loves you as much as he loves me. It’s just he thinks you can take care of yourself and I need protection. He has such old-fashioned notions about females.” One hears of dogs suffering when their owners die, but cats? Wasn’t it Gwen who told him that her dissertation advisor’s dog, a corgi, hours after the man died of pancreatic cancer in his summer home in Maine, walked out of the house and down to the shore that bordered the property and swam out into the ocean and drowned? It was Gwen, this happened the summer before they met, and it was another type of cancer, one also very quick and with a small chance of curing, and the dog kept swimming farther and farther out — the man’s children on shore were calling her back and then went after her in a rowboat — till the waves went over her and she disappeared. “Was she found?” he remembers asking, and she said “Days later, a couple of coves away.” He’d never heard anything like that with cats. Devoted, but dying? He’d have to ask someone who knows much more about them than he, but he won’t; he’ll forget. Or something. Gwen said she took her advisor’s death very badly. He and his wife by this time had become close friends of hers. He unlocks and opens the kitchen door and goes outside. Maybe he is out. “Sleek? Sleek?” he says. Walks to both ends of the carport and a few feet along the driveway. “Sleek, you out here?” We don’t want to lose you. That would be too much,” and he starts crying and wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “Oh, shit, what the hell is happening to me?” he says. “This whole fucking thing is making me crazy. Please, Sleek, if you’re out here, listen to me. You have to come home.” He whistles for him and makes tsking sounds with his mouth, something he does to get him back into the house when it’s getting dark outside or into the kitchen from another room when he puts fresh food on the floor. But what’s he thinking? Cat’s got to be inside. It’s what he previously thought: the kids would have made sure he was in before they locked the outside doors and shut off all the lights and went to their rooms. He’s probably with one of them. If he is, they’d keep the door partially open, and he goes in to look and both their doors are closed. He’s still sure Sleek’s with one of them. Just, whoever he’s with forgot to leave her door open so he could get water or food in the kitchen or use the litter box in the hallway bathroom. But they both know if he wants to get out of a room and the door’s shut, he’d stand on his back paws and scratch the door till they opened it. Everything’s all right. Again, he’s making something out of nothing. Well, he’s fragile; has become so; look at it that way, what can he do? He’s grieving, let’s face it, grieving, and that might go on for he doesn’t know how long, so cry all you want. Cry when you feel like crying. Cry when the feeling swoops over you for you don’t know what reason, but don’t go batty, that’s all. And if you can, try to keep it to when you’re alone. If the kids happen to witness it, and it wasn’t that their crying precipitated it, that’d be okay, too. Is he making sense? He thinks so. As he said before, everything’s okay, at least for now. Though maybe Sleek heard him calling his name before and only just came back. He looks outside though the kitchen door and then goes outside to look. No, Sleek’s inside. And while he’s out here, should he get today’s newspapers by the mailbox? It’ll only take a few seconds. But a neighbor might drive down the hill on his way to work or the gym and stop to ask him how he is and he’d have to speak, if he couldn’t wave him off, and then what? He’s not ready. And he doesn’t want to read the news. Knows that much about himself. Doesn’t want to hear it on the radio either. Doesn’t want to look at the papers for anything that might be in them. He won’t cancel his subscriptions, but he doesn’t know when he might want to look at them again. If he thinks it’s going to be a while — more than two weeks — he’ll cancel. But now he doesn’t see himself sitting in his Morris chair with his mug of coffee on the chair’s arm, as he’s done with the Sun just about every morning for around the last twenty years. Or the Times at night before dinner for probably the same number of years, with a drink on the chair’s arm. First reading the headlines of each paper and then the beginnings of two or three of the articles underneath them. Then turning to page two of the first section of the Times to see what section and page the obituaries of noteworthy people are in. If it’s of someone who might interest him — a writer, a war hero, a baseball player or movie actor or actress or entertainer like that who was prominent when he was a kid or till he was around sixteen or eighteen — he usually reads it. The ones of fiction writers and poets and literary critics he always reads. The Sun’s obituaries he’s less interested in unless it’s someone he knows or is familiar with personally or the obituary headline says he went through some war experience or something like that, and they’re always in the same place in the paper, right after the op-ed page at the end of the first section. Then reading the various sections of the papers in no regular order. And today’s weather, tonight’s, tomorrow’s, sometimes the box that has the national forecast, and on the same weather report page, what the temperatures are in Fargo and Phoenix and Los Angeles and Des Moines. Old friends of his now live in the last two cities, or the friend in Iowa in a small city forty miles from Des Moines, and he liked to see what the weather was like for them there. Fargo and Phoenix because it gets so cold in one and hot in the other and it sort of was a game he played with himself comparing the two temperature extremes on the same day. He also checked almost every day what the temperature and forecast were in Paris. Gwen and he had lived there by themselves at different times in their lives and stayed there three times together for up to two weeks, once with Rosalind and the last time with both kids, and talked about renting an apartment there for a couple of months on his next sabbatical. Could they have done that? Doesn’t think so. Not after her first stroke, or definitely her second. Of course, New York too, and he also would have liked to see what the weather was like every day in the area they summered at in Maine for so many years, but the closest city listed, Portland, is more than a hundred-fifty miles away. Just realized: he exchanges letters with those two friends every month or so, and next time he writes them, and he doesn’t know when he’ll feel like doing that again, he’ll have to tell them about Gwen. “I have very bad news. My dear Gwen…” But very short. If he first gets a letter from them — he forgets who owes whom — they’ll ask about her and hope she’s well, as they always do, and for him to give her their best or love. If he doesn’t write them for months after that, they’ll sense — probably even before — something’s wrong because of her two previous strokes, and call, and he’ll have to tell them then. “I want to make this quick. It’s been months, but I still have trouble talking about it. Our dear Gwen…” Maybe he’d be better off writing them a brief note in the next week. In almost one sentence, that she suffered another stroke at home and died in the hospital and when — the exact date — and that he’s unable to write any more about it now. And if they call to offer their condolences and find out how he is? “As you got from my note, it’s impossible for me to talk about it. Maybe down the line sometime. I’m sorry for being so abrupt — you know that’s not the typical me — but I’ll have to say goodbye.” No, they’ll worry. Just say it’s been a terrific blow, but he’s all right and for them not to worry about him and he’ll call sometime soon, which he won’t. What’s he doing? There is no way; he can see that. Maybe if he gets the kids to write his two friends about Gwen and anybody else who doesn’t know she died but probably should, though he can’t think of anyone else right now. In her address book and computer she has a number of names of friends and scholars in her field and home-care providers — women who looked after her while she was recovering and he was at work — they say they didn’t contact about her death or for the memorial, but he assumes they knew what they were doing. Didn’t mean anything to him who came to the memorial or not. They can say to his two friends that their father asked them to write. But they shouldn’t say anything more about him except, if they want, that he’s all right. Ah, let them write what they want. They’re bright, tactful, sensitive to other people’s feelings; they’ll write good letters. The important thing is to get it out of the way. They can even use the same letter for both his friends and anyone else they might want to write to about Gwen. So that’s what he’ll do. As he said, his friends and whoever else will just have to understand why it’s not coming from him. So where was he? Thinking about something, but what? The papers. News. What he read in them every day and in what order. Important? Doubts it. But he was thinking about it for some reason, so maybe he’ll find out why by finishing the thought. Reviews after what was the last thing he said he read. And that was? Forgets. Sun didn’t have many of them. Maybe a Baltimore Symphony concert during the week and a new TV show or two and a play once a month and always movies — lots of them — every Friday. Times, of course, had them all the time. He rarely read the Times’ reviews of dance or popular music or architecture or Broadway musicals, and in the Sun he doesn’t think he read a single review of a musical that came to Baltimore. Didn’t read TV reviews in either paper, except of Masterpiece Theatre and a few other PBS specials, but only so he could tell Gwen about them. She watched and he sometimes did to have a couple of glasses of wine during them, but mainly to keep her company in the bedroom so she wouldn’t watch them alone, especially the weeks after she returned home from the hospital. He thinks that’s the second time since last night he mentioned that, maybe the third. Why? Pictures her sitting in a chair in front of the television, not looking well but a lot better than when she was in the hospital, and…what? Shudders. Sees her sick. Weak. Everything an effort. Closes his eyes, opens them. She’s gone. She’d look at him from the chair, smile. He’d say “Program’s pretty good. I’m enjoying it,” and she’d smile again, glad he was there, and look back at the television. Did she believe him? Probably not. “Can I get you something?” he’d say several times while they watched the program. “I don’t mind missing a little,” and she’d shake her head or say no. She must have known he was going into the kitchen to fill up his glass. Did she think “He needs to drink to be with me?” No. “Are you comfortable? Do you want a pillow for your back? You’ve been in that position for so long,” and sometimes she’d say yes and he’d get it for her, or something to cover her legs. Oh, if only he could have had her illness for her. He means that. Easy to think it, though, right? But he would have. And then, if that was the deal, she could get whatever was coming to him later on. But she was almost eleven years younger than he, so she’d have those extra pretty healthy years, at least. And then who knows how he’ll go. Maybe in his sleep overnight. Maybe a stroke in his sleep that’d kill him the first time. Stupid thoughts. Why think them? They don’t make sense and what do they bring? Not comfort, that’s for sure. Dreams of her do. The ones on which she’s healthy and not angry at him. The best are when they’re embracing and deeply kissing, better than the ones with sex. Why? They feel real, the two or so he’s had. After he woke up from them, for a few seconds, he still felt her on his lips. Crazy, he knows, but it made him feel good, as if she’d forgiven him. The sex dreams he’s had always ended before he came, and he woke up frustrated. No, in one he came. But the papers. Get to the end of your thought. Which reviews did he also read? Never of video games, something new in reviews and which hasn’t come to the Sun yet. It will. The games have become too popular not to. Also, never of movies listed as having strong violence or were for children or seemed geared to adolescents or even to people in their twenties. Times’ review he usually read first of the many it’d have of different things on just an ordinary weekday — not Friday — was the book one if it seemed like an interesting subject to get some quick knowledge of or a book he might want to buy and read. Always looking for them, or used to. Couldn’t imagine not having a book to read. Not reading anything now. Looks at the first page of a book he took out of one of the bookcases or the page he last left off at of the novel he was reading before she died and can’t concentrate, reads the first sentence or paragraph over and over again and still can’t quite make sense of it no matter how simply it’s written, and puts the book down or back. Demons, a new translation, was more than halfway through it. Liked it? Kept his interest. Lots of good characters and dialog and he liked that some of what they said was in French with translations at the bottom of the page. Read a much earlier translation of the book under a different title more than fifty years ago when he was eighteen, nineteen, and he read almost straight through everything of his he could find in the Donnell Library on 53rd Street. Seemed the best place to get them. He’s saying it had shelves and shelves of Dostoevsky. He remembers where they were: in back, on the extreme right, first floor. He’ll go back to the book or start another. When, he doesn’t know, but he has to. What else is there for him to do? Make soup, a salad, clean the house, launder his clothes once a week and his linens every other, resume his workouts at the Towson Y three — four times a week when he’s ready to? Maybe, once the kids leave, he’ll go every day, just to be around people and lots of noisy activity for an hour and use the showers there, which are much better than his. And watch one of the cable news shows while he’s on the exercise bike, after he’s done with the resistance machines and weights, or switch around from one news station to the other or movie channel if it’s a good film. In other words, to get out of the house to do something other than shop or take a short walk in the neighborhood around dusk and maybe once or twice during it say “Hello” or “Good evening” to someone he passes. He might even start using the Y’s pool if the water’s warm enough. But he’s a ways from doing any of that yet. Will he go back to teaching? Doesn’t think so, at least not for a while. He can’t see himself seeing anybody who knew Gwen, without breaking down. Did he ever go to the ballet with Gwen? Just thinking. The opera, of course, many times in Baltimore and New York, but the ballet? Once, in Baltimore, with the kids about ten years ago. Forgets the name of the company — it was from France and they sat in the orchestra because the balcony was sold out. One of the dances was to a recording that sounded like a full orchestra in the pit and a singer off to the side of the stage of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, a piece Gwen and he loved before they even knew each other and which was why they thought they had to go. Oh, yeah. Another time, just the two of them, more than twenty years ago at the State Theater he thinks it was still called then in Lincoln Center. Her mother bought them the tickets and looked after Rosalind that night. He thinks they went to a Japanese Restaurant for dinner after — Ozu. No, that’s the one they liked in the Eighties on Amsterdam or Columbus. Dan, on Broadway and 68th. Their first time there. Funny how things come back. Remembers during an intermission looking down to the lobby from one of the top floors and wondering if anyone in all the years this place has been here had jumped from it. And then the hospital she was brought to after her first stroke. There was a walkway — a bridge over a huge atrium, really — to her intensive care unit, overlooking some other part of the hospital three to four floors below. Maternity, the waiting area, and he thought when he stopped on it if anyone…not “if anyone.” He thought if she dies he might come here and check that nobody’s directly below him and throw himself off. Why? Thought it several times when he walked over the bridge and stopped and rested his forearms on the railing and looked down, but not the second time she had a stroke and was brought to the same ICU. Because he didn’t think he could live without her. Well, can he? Has to. The kids. Their mother dying so suddenly? Gwen’s mother, whom they also loved very much, committing suicide six years before? Then their father going the same way? That’s just what they needed. And he’ll find other good reasons not to, but that one stands out. Anyway — get off that subject — since Gwen and he liked ballet and modern dance and most of the music for them, how come they didn’t go more? And both girls were in dance classes for years, as was Gwen when she was young and her mother took her to see lots of ballet, so why didn’t they take them? Doesn’t know. No, not that excuse again. Maybe it never came up. But he’s making himself less observant than he is. He read the Sun every day. He always knew what was playing in town — movies, plays, music, museum shows — since there wasn’t that much. What’s true is that very few dance companies came through Baltimore, and like the one they finally went to, usually for just one performance and at night. And so they might have wanted to take them to other dance concerts but it was a school night, let’s say, or in some other way the timing wasn’t right. Also, the Garry Trudeau comic strip on the op-ed page of the Sun. That, he read first when he turned to that page. And in both papers, he’d say about half the letters to the editor. Although in the Times, all of them if they were on a subject he was deeply interested in and wanted to read other opinions of or get reinforcement of his own — the war in Iraq, for instance; torture there; tax laws that so one-sidedly favored the very rich; the current president. He wrote a few letters to the Times but always tore them up, two or three in the envelopes he’d already addressed, sealed and stamped. Other people were able to write these letters on the same subjects so much more articulately and succinctly and informatively than he and get their outrage across without, like him, sounding a bit crazy. And some of the papers’ op-ed articles and editorials and, in the baseball season, the sports pages. He never opened the Styles section of the Times or that other section in it the same Thursday, rarely looked at its Tuesday science section or the Sun’s health section unless there was an article on strokes or caregiving or something that might relate to his own health or talked about the aging process or memory loss or drinking too much or the vitamin supplements he takes or should be taking at his age. Starts every morning with one of several different pills, but he can take them later today or wait till tomorrow. No hurry. What’s a day or two? And what do they do for him anyhow? Forgets why he started taking them years ago. Gwen encouraged him to. But what’s folic acid and Vitamin E and B-50 for, and so on? Why not a different B, and why the E 400 pill and not another number? Gwen knew. Maybe he’ll stop taking them altogether or just take C and the baby aspirin once a day? Didn’t open the business section in the papers either unless, as in the Times, it was where the sports pages, and again only during baseball season, or obituaries were that day. He’s back in the house. Doesn’t remember walking to it or even opening the kitchen door to get inside and doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Few seconds? More than a minute? What else has he missed? Later he’ll ask one of the girls to get the newspapers from the driveway. He’ll say he doesn’t want to read them but they can if they want. They also might want to see what movies are playing. If they feel like it, they should go to one tonight. Might be a nice distraction, he’ll say, and he’ll be fine alone. Or just take the papers out of their plastic bags and put them in the recycle bag by the trash can. He empties Sleek’s water bowl into one of Gwen’s Christmas cactuses on the dining room windowsill. They’re so pretty when they bloom. There must be six or seven of them and they all started from pieces of a plant that had broken off, and the first one from a broken-off piece someone had given her when they lived in their first house, and they all always start flowering about the same time of the year. She fed them plant food a couple of times a year, and if he can’t find it — it came in a box with a little plastic scoop — he’ll ask the girls to go to a garden store and get the right one. Feels inside the water bowl. It’s not slimy, which it can get if it’s not washed with detergent every three or four times. He fills the bowl with fresh water and puts it back on the kitchen floor. Thinks: Didn’t he already do that this morning? Knows he thought of opening a new can of cat food and emptying half of it onto Sleek’s plate and putting the plate on the floor next to the water bowl, but only when he comes out from wherever he is. Cat’s gotten so picky. Won’t eat the canned food if it’s been sitting around on the floor for more than half an hour. What next? To do. Coffee he definitely wants and can use. What mug today? Big decisions he’s left with. Looks at the six mugs hanging on pegs attached to the bottom of the spice rack on the wall. Most of the spices are way past their “best by” date and should be thrown out. Will he replace them? Doubts it. Probably just the curry powder and cumin for soups and maybe the red pepper flakes. Last couple of years he really only cooked for her and for a few small dinner parties they gave, but otherwise he didn’t care what he ate. Didn’t he already think that too? Something like it. Nothing new to say. But he doesn’t think he’ll get interested in cooking again, unless it’s for the kids when they’re here. And all those special German knives and French pots and pans she had before they met. More things to give to the kids. For himself, if he wants something more than a sandwich or salad or quick soup he’ll make, he’ll rely mostly on restaurant take-out and prepared and ready-to-cook foods from the local food market. He has more mugs in a kitchen cupboard, no two alike, and he never uses the one he drank from the morning before. Any reason why? Seems silly. He should break the habit. All right, he’ll break it, but some other day. The ceramic one’s his favorite. There were two — a friend’s wife in Maine made them — but he broke one, or Gwen did, just a few months ago. The mugs were given to them as a good-bye gift the last time they saw the couple there. Gwen and he gave them that same day a copy of a book each of them wrote. “I never know what to inscribe,” he said to her, and she said “Just say ‘with love.’ You mean it.” “Is that what you’re going to say?” and she said yes and he said “Well, we can’t say the same thing. I’ll think of something,” but he forgets what. The couple — they’re both around eighty — lives year-round in the woods there, about three hours north of the cottage they last rented, painting and potting, and also don’t know about Gwen. He should make a list. The ceramic mug, and Gwen felt the same way, is not only nice to look at but to put his hands around, so smooth because of the special glaze, which might have been why it slipped out of whoever’s hands were holding it. Odd he can’t remember whose. But the black mug keeps the coffee hot longer; what he wants today before the kids get up: to just sit down in a quiet place and drink slowly. Its better heat containment — now that’s a fancy term for it and possibly a wrong one — might have something to do with what it’s made of, the thickness of it, maybe also the color; something, and the handle’s large enough for him to get his three fingers in, the only mug he has where he can do that. Gwen could do that with most of their mugs; he’s even seen her get four fingers in some, her fingers were so thin. Takes the black mug off its peg and puts it beside the coffeemaker on the other side of the sink from the dish drainer and rubber mat. Some heated-up soy milk with it, maybe half? Easier on the stomach. Too much bother, and then the saucepan to wash. Really has to scrub hard with the sponge to get all the soymilk off the bottom of it. But again, much better for the stomach so early. Nah, a quicker pick-me-up if it’s all black. Turns the coffeemaker on and goes into the living room, where he’ll wait till the coffee’s made. He’ll hear it, after all the water’s gone through: the hissing and steaming and a sound that’s almost like someone gargling. He sits in the Morris chair. No need to turn the floor lamp on. Most times before, when he sat like this waiting for the morning coffee to be made, he did it with something to read. Did he buy this chair or the Maillol print in his bedroom with some of the money from the first story he sold to a major magazine? Whichever it was, the other he bought with just about all the money he got from the first sale of a story to any magazine. Someone suggested he do that. His mother, he thinks: “This way you’ll always have a tangible reminder of your first acceptance” or “sale.” He got both so cheap. Chair in a used furniture store at the Columbus Avenue corner of the block he lived on, and the print — actually, a woodcut of a clothed peasant woman sleeping on her back in a field — at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth. Suddenly he thinks of a dream he had between Gwen’s first and second strokes, but when she seemed fully recovered. Now where the hell did that come from? he thinks. He wrote it down when he woke up from it. Gwen pushed herself up on her elbows — she’d been sleeping on her back, so the peasant woman? Gwen? — and said “Why’s the light on? It’s still dark out. You feeling okay?” and he said “Sorry. Dream I had. I want to write it down or I’ll lose it. It’s so interesting. I’ll tell you about it later,” and he finished writing it in the notebook he kept on his night table and shut the light and probably turned to her — she was already asleep on her side — and held her from behind and went back to sleep. It was one of several dreams he wrote down around that time and he must have read it when he woke up later or sometime after, and maybe a number of times. It seemed pretty clear what it meant then, but you never know. He remembers thinking it was one of the more vivid dreams he’d had with her in it. They were on Broadway, walking north on the west side of the street, between 115th and 116th Streets, which was a block away from where they had their Riverside Drive apartment till a few years ago. They were on their way to a restaurant on 117th Street and Broadway for lunch. There is no restaurant there; no side street, either; none till about a Hundred-twentieth. Just Barnard: a college dormitory or school building, he forgets which. He’d passed it many times on his way to or back from a garage farther north on Broadway. About twenty young doctors, male and female, all in lab coats, he thinks they’re called, or just white coats, the kind they wear when they make their hospital rounds. The doctors stopped at the 116th Street corner and waited for the light to turn green. They stood behind the doctors. Then he said “Let’s go around them. I’m sure they’re going to the same restaurant, and if they get there before us we won’t be able to get a table.” He put his hand on her back and guided her into the street and they started to cross a Hundred-sixteenth against the light. Cars going both ways had to stop so they could get to the other side. A couple of cars honked at them, and she looked alarmed. “Don’t be worried,” he said. “You’re with me. You’re safe.” They got across the street and he looked back. The light hadn’t changed yet and the doctors were still standing on the corner. Most of them gave Gwen and him dirty looks, as if they shouldn’t have gone in front of them and then crossed the street against the light. She said “They look angry. I don’t like people to be angry because of me or something I did. Maybe we should wait for them here and apologize.” He said “And let them get in front of us and to the restaurant first? You’re okay. It was nothing you did.” He took her hand and said “I love you.” She looked lovingly at him and said “I love you too.” “Good, we’re in love,” he said, “so nothing should really bother us,” and they continued walking, holding hands. When they were a few feet from the restaurant, he said “I know what I’m going to have. Their chicken salad platter, if they’re not all out of it,” and she said “And I’m going to have their fried oysters.” “Less chance they’ll have those left than my chicken salad,” he said, “but maybe you’ll be lucky. I hope so. I know how much you love them.” She smiled and said “You bet.” That he especially remembers from the dream. It was something he used to say a lot and she never did. But she adopted it the last few years and he, for the most part, stopped saying it because he felt the expression had become more hers than his, and he knew how much she liked saying it. No, that’s not quite it. Then what is? She used so few colloquialisms in her speech that he didn’t want to make her self-conscious of sort of stealing this one from him and stop saying it. No, that’s not quite it, either. He opened the door of the restaurant and stepped aside so she could get past him. The place was crowded. He took her hand again and led her to the one free table. The dream ended. Oh, there was a little more — they looked at the luncheon specials on a blackboard as they made their way to the table — but that was basically it. A nice dream. Long. Nothing bad happened. The doctors never caught up with them. The day was sunny and mild and the restaurant was brightly lit inside only by daylight coming through the windows. She was well, happy through most of it, and looked so pretty. They were hungry and about to eat. They held hands. They loved each other. But why didn’t they kiss? Would have been a nice way to end the dream or to happen right after they said they loved each other. But what he dreamt was good enough. He doesn’t know if he told her the dream when they woke up later that morning or after they got out of bed. If he ever told her. He told her just about all his dreams she was in except those where she died or was dead or very sick. Or if she was in one where one of the kids died. What’s that smell? Electric? As if a short, or something like that, and coming from the kitchen, it seems, and he gets up and goes into it. Coffeemaker’s sputtering, making almost hiccupping sounds. Thinks he knows what it is; same thing’s happened to him once or twice. Shuts off the coffeemaker, takes the carafe off the warming plate, shakes it, and nothing’s inside. Opens the water tank cover and looks inside. It’s what he thought. Dummy; dummy. He didn’t put water in the tank or a paper filter into the filter basket, so of course also no coffee grounds in the paper. He usually does all this the night before — sometimes even the afternoon before, when he knows he has enough coffee in his thermos for the rest of the day — so he won’t have to do it the same morning he’s going to make the coffee. It doesn’t make for better coffee. It might even make it worse, with the water staying in the tank so long, and who knows if the coffee grounds aren’t weakened or marred or something a little by being in the same closed compartment with the water all night. But he likes the idea of just walking into the kitchen the next morning and, without any preparations, pressing the on switch to get the coffee started. He fills the carafe with water up to the four-cup level inside. Waits another fifteen seconds to make sure the heating coils, or whatever they are, aren’t still too hot to pour the water in, which might harm the machine, and empties the carafe into the tank. He puts a paper filter into the filter basket, flattens the seams of the paper so none of the dripping water goes down the outside of it, chooses the bag of Colombia Supremo coffee grounds over the Kona — it’s lighter, so more a morning coffee, and smells and tastes better; he’s never going to get the Kona again but will use up what he has — and puts three tablespoons of it into the paper and turns the coffeemaker on. Go back to the living room chair while the coffee’s being made? Why? It’ll take no more than four minutes. He can even pour some coffee in mid-brew by taking the carafe off the warming plate, which stops the flow for up to thirty seconds, so maybe he’ll do that. But then the coffee will be too strong for so early in the morning, unless he adds soymilk. He opens the refrigerator and takes the soymilk out. But he wants his coffee hot and black — that’s what he feels like this morning — so better wait till it’s done, and he puts the soymilk back. No, he’ll have some now and sit with it, and he pulls the carafe out and pours the little that’s in it into the mug.