The Beginner's Goodbye

5

How could I have missed so many clues?

Nandina’s frequent intrusions on my meetings with Gil, for instance. Granted, she had always been a bit nosy, but this was extreme: if Gil and I were conferring in the living room, she just happened to need a book from the living-room bookcase, and then, while she was at it, she had to offer us some refreshments, and when she returned with a tray, she would oh-so-casually linger to contribute her two bits, eventually drifting toward a chair and dropping into it as if without realizing what she was doing.

And her willingness to drive over to my house on the slightest excuse — to empty my fridge, check on the plastering, verify my choice of caramel or whatever-it-was flooring. Always in the daytime, you notice. Always when Gil was most likely to be there as well.

And those questions she had asked about his background. Why, she hadn’t been asking out of suspicion! That was personal curiosity. She was like a high-school girl who ferrets out the most trivial details about a boy she has a crush on — his gym schedule and his homeroom number. And, exactly like a high-school girl, she seized on every opportunity to speak his name. “Gilead,” she had said, and her spoon had halted in the saucepan.

Plus, she never changed into a housecoat anymore. I hadn’t seen her in a housecoat in weeks.

But did Gil return her affections?

I felt a twinge that was almost a pain. I couldn’t bear it if I were forced to pity her.

Consider this, though: Gil really hadn’t needed to meet with me as often as he did. More than once I had told him that the work appeared to be going fine, and he should just let me know the next time he had any issues to discuss. It seemed he constantly had issues. And at every meeting he was more talkative; more extraneous subjects arose; it seemed more like a conversation with a friend. Here I’d been flattering myself that it was me he was warming to! I’d sniffed the air when he’d walked in recently, caught the scent of Old Spice, and said, “Somebody’s got plans for the evening,” expecting we might embark on a little chitchat about his social life. But he had merely turned red, and I had wondered if I’d overstepped — assumed too quickly that we were more than employer-employee.

Besides which, how come he had told her, but not me, that he’d be coming unusually early that evening?

I didn’t say anything direct to either one of them. I accepted a glass of Nandina’s juice, sat talking with them a few minutes, let Gil present his report on that day’s work. But underneath, I was extremely alert, and I saw how Nandina continued to hang around even though his report concerned some antiquated wiring they’d discovered in my living-room wall—not an interesting topic, and certainly not one that called for her opinion. I saw how their hands happened to brush when he passed her his empty glass. How she leaned against the doorframe and tipped her head alluringly as we were seeing him out at the end of the meeting.

Then she hurried back to the kitchen to start supper preparations, not giving me so much as a glance, allowing me no chance to question her.

I didn’t pursue it, of course. She was a fully grown woman. She had a right to her privacy.

Everything I knew about Gil so far had made me like him. He seemed to be a good man — honest, reliable, skilled, kindhearted. He may not have finished college, but he was clearly intelligent, and I imagined that he and Nandina could operate on a more or less equal footing. So I had no objections.

But I couldn’t help feeling, oh, a bit wistful as I watched them together over the next couple of weeks.

It was April, by then — early spring. Although the weather was still coolish, the daffodils were in full bloom and the trees were starting to flower. Gil and Nandina began to go out openly on what I guess you might call dates. The first date, shortly after the juicer episode, Nandina informed me about obliquely by announcing that she wouldn’t be cooking supper the following evening. Gil had suggested they try this new café in Hampden, she said. I said, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ll reheat some of that beef stew”—as if food were really the issue here. The next evening, I sat reading the newspaper on the couch, and when Gil rang the doorbell I let Nandina answer. He stepped into the living room to say, “Hey there, Aaron,” and I raised my head and said, “How you doing, Gil.” He looked sheepish but determined, his face gleaming from a recent shave and his short-sleeved shirt carefully pressed. How long had he been coming to this house in clothes too fresh to have been that day’s work clothes? Almost from the start of our dealings together, I realized. So he may have felt attracted to Nandina all along.

I was genuinely glad for them, I swear. And yet, after they had taken their leave, when I turned in my seat to watch them through the front window, I felt stabbed to the heart by the sight of their two figures walking side by side toward Gil’s pickup. They were almost touching but not quite; there was perhaps an inch or two of empty space between them, and you could tell somehow that both of them were very conscious of this space — acutely conscious, electrically conscious. I thought of a moment early in my acquaintance with Dorothy, when she had offered to show me around her workplace. She stood up and went to her office door, and I jumped to my feet to follow, reaching past her and over her head to pull the door farther open. I guess it must have confused her. She stepped back. For an instant she was standing under the shelter of my arm, and although there was not one single point of contact between us, I felt I was surrounding her with an invisible layer of warmth and protection.

Even that early, I loved her.

We met in March of 1996, during The Beginner’s Cancer. Byron Worth, M.D., was our writer — an internist who had already supplied the material for The Beginner’s Childbirth and The Beginner’s Heart Attack. These books were not particularly technical, you understand. They were more on the order of household-hint collections: how to sleep comfortably in the advanced stages of pregnancy, how to order heart-healthfully in restaurants. For the cancer book Dr. Worth had already turned in the chemo section, which included some delicious-sounding recipes for calorie-rich smoothies, but in radiology he fell short, by his own admission. He said we probably needed to consult a specialist. And that’s how I came to make an appointment with Dr. Dorothy Rosales, who had treated Charles’s father-in-law after his thyroid surgery.

She was wearing a white coat so crisp that it could have stood on its own, but her trousers were creased and rumpled, in part because they were too long for her. They buckled over the insteps of her cloddish shoes and they trailed the ground at her heels. This made her seem even shorter than she actually was, and wider. She was standing by a bookshelf when her receptionist showed me into her office. She was consulting some large, thick volume, and since her glasses were meant for distance she had pushed them up onto her forehead, which gave her a peculiar, quadruple-eyed aspect that caused me to start grinning the instant I saw her. But even in that first glance, I liked her broad, tan face and her tranquil expression. I congratulated myself for perceiving that her unbecomingly chopped hair was — as they say — as black as a raven’s wing.

I said, “Dr. Rosales?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Aaron Woolcott. I called you about consulting on our book project.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

This threw me off my stride for a moment. I hesitated, and then I held out my hand. “It’s good to meet you,” I said.

Her own hand was warm and cushioned but rough-skinned. She shook mine efficiently and then stepped back to lower her glasses to their proper position. “What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked me.

It’s true that when I extend my arm to shake hands, I tend to aid it slightly by supporting my elbow with my good hand. But most people don’t catch that, or at least if they do they don’t comment. I said, “Oh, just a childhood illness.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, have a seat.”

I sat down in a molded plastic chair in front of her desk. There was another chair next to it. I imagined that two people generally came for the initial consultation — a married couple, or a grown son or daughter with an aged parent. This office must have seen some very distraught visitors. But Dr. Rosales, settling behind her desk now in a deliberate, unhurried way, would have made them feel instantly reassured. She placed her palms together and said, “I’m not certain what you want of me.”

“Well, no actual writing,” I told her. “We have an internist doing that for us, Dr. Byron Worth.”

I paused, giving her time to react if she recognized the name. Instead, she just went on watching me. Her eyes were pure black through and through, without a hint of any other colors behind them. For the first time it crossed my mind that she might be a foreigner; I mean more foreign than a mere descendant of someone Hispanic.

“Dr. Worth is trying to give our readers a few tips for handling the day-to-day obstacles confronted by the cancer patient,” I said. “He’s discussed the emotional issues, the doctor-patient transactions, the practical aspects of various treatment options … except for radiation, which he hasn’t had any experience with. He suggested that an oncology radiologist might walk us through that — tell us what the patient can expect, in the most concrete terms.”

“I see,” she said.

Silence.

“Of course we would pay you for your time, and acknowledge your assistance in the preface.”

I considered going on to tell her that, after The Beginner’s Childbirth, a doula who’d been mentioned by name had tripled her client load. But I wasn’t sure that physicians actively sought out business in quite the same way. Especially this physician. She seemed to need nothing. She seemed entire in herself.

She seemed fascinating.

“Say,” I said. “It’s almost noon. May I take you out to lunch so that we can discuss this further?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Uh …”

“What,” she said, “you just want to know the process? But the process is different for each type of tumor. For each individual patient, even.”

“Oh, well, we wouldn’t have to go into great detail,” I told her. “Nothing excessively medical, ha ha.”

I was acting like an idiot. Dr. Rosales was sitting back and watching me. I started racking my brain for some sample questions, but none came to mind. Supposedly I was there just to make the arrangements. Then Dr. Worth would take over.

No way was I going to let him take over Dorothy Rosales.

“All right,” I said, “here’s a plan. I will make up a written list this very afternoon of what we need to know. Then, before you decide either way, you could look through it. Maybe over dinner; I could buy you dinner. Unless … you have a husband to get home to?”

“No.”

“Dinner at the Old Bay,” I said. I had to struggle to keep the happiness out of my voice. I’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but nowadays that didn’t mean much. “As soon as you get off work tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why does this have to involve food?”

“Well … you’d need to eat anyway, right?”

“Right,” she said, and she looked relieved. I could tell this was the kind of logic that appealed to her. “Fine, Mr.—”

“Woolcott. Aaron.”

“Where is this Old Bay place?”

“Oh, I can drive you there. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Our lot has a punch-clock.”

“Excuse me?”

“Our parking lot. We pay by the hour. No point forking over any more money than I have to.”

“Oh.”

She stood up, and I stood, too. “I won’t be finished here till seven,” she told me.

“That’s okay! I’ll reserve a table for half past. The restaurant is only about fifteen minutes from here.”

“In that case, a quarter past would appear to be more appropriate,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “A quarter past.”

I took a business card from my billfold and wrote down the Old Bay’s address. As a rule I would have written it on the blank side of the card, but this time I chose the front. I wanted her to become familiar with my name. I wanted her to start calling me “Aaron.”

But all she said when we parted was, “Goodbye, then.” She didn’t use any form of my name. And she didn’t bother seeing me out.

I could tell she must not be from Baltimore, because anyone from Baltimore would have known the Old Bay. That was where all our parents used to eat. It was old-fashioned in both good ways and bad. (The crab soup, for instance, was the real thing, but the waiters were in their eighties and the atmosphere was gloomy and dank.) I had chosen it for geographical reasons, since it wasn’t far from Dorothy’s office, but also I wanted a place that was not too businesslike, not too efficient. I wanted her to start thinking of me in a more, so to speak, social light.

Well. Clearly I had my work cut out for me, because she arrived in her doctor coat. Dressed-up couples dotted the room, the women in the soft pastels of early spring, but there stood Dorothy beside the maître d’ with her leather satchel slung bandolier-style across her chest and her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her starched white coat.

I stood up and raised a hand. She headed for my table, leaving the maître d’ in her dust. “Hi,” she said when she reached me. She took hold of the chair opposite mine, but I beat her to it and slid it out for her. “Welcome!” I told her as she sat down. I returned to my own chair. “Thank — thank you for coming.”

“It’s awfully dark,” she said, looking around the room. She freed herself from her satchel and set it at her feet. “You’re expecting me to read in this?”

“Read? Oh, no, only the menu,” I said, and I gave a chuckle that came out sounding fake. “I did phone Dr. Worth for a list of questions to ask you, but he said what he would prefer is, we should arrange a time when you can walk me through your facility. See the process from start to finish, as if I were a patient.”

In fact, I had not mentioned a word of this to Dr. Worth, but I doubted if he would object to my doing some of his research for him.

Dorothy said, “So … we came to this restaurant just to set up an appointment?”

“But then also we need to discuss your terms. How much would you propose to be paid, for one thing, and — what would you like to drink?”

Our waiter had arrived, was why I asked, but Dorothy looked startled, perhaps imagining for an instant that this was another business decision. Then her expression cleared, and she told the waiter, “A Diet Pepsi, please.”

“Diet!” I said. “A doctor, drinking artificial sweeteners?”

She blinked.

“Don’t you know what aspartame does to your central nervous system?” I asked. (I’d been heavily influenced by The Beginner’s Book of Nutrition, not to mention my sister’s anti-soft-drink crusade.) “Have a glass of wine, instead. A red wine; good for your heart.”

“Well … all right.”

I accepted the wine list from the waiter and chose a Malbec, two glasses. When the waiter had left, Dorothy said, “I’m not very used to drinking alcohol.”

“But you’re familiar with the virtues of the Mediterranean diet, surely.”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes narrowed.

“And I know you must have heard about olive oil.”

“Look,” she said. “Are you going to start telling me your symptoms?”

“What?”

“I’m here to discuss a book project, okay? I don’t want to check out some little freckle that might be cancer.”

“Check out what? What freckle?”

“Or hear about some time when you thought your pulse might have skipped a beat.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked.

She started looking uncertain.

“My pulse is perfect!” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Sorry,” she said.

She lowered her gaze to her place setting. She moved her spoon half an inch to her right. She said, “A lot of times, people outside of the office ask me for free advice. Even if they’re just sitting next to me on an airplane, they ask.”

“Did I ask? Did you hear me ask you anything?”

“Well, but I thought—”

“You seem to be suffering from a serious misapprehension,” I told her. “If I need advice, I’ll make an appointment with my family physician. Who is excellent, by the way, and knows my entire medical history besides, not that I ever have the slightest reason to call on him.”

“I already said I was sorry.”

She took off her glasses and polished them on her napkin, still keeping her eyes lowered. Her eyelashes were thick but very short and stubby. Her mouth was clamped in a thin, unhappy line.

I said, “Hey. Dorothy. Want to start over?”

There was a pause. I saw the corners of her lips start to twitch, and then she looked up at me and smiled.

It makes me sad now to think back on the early days of our courtship. We didn’t know anything at all. Dorothy didn’t even know it was a courtship, at the beginning, and I was kind of like an overgrown puppy, at least as I picture myself from this distance. I was romping around her all eager and panting, dying to impress her, while for some time she remained stolidly oblivious.

By that stage of life, I’d had my fair share of romances. I had left behind the high-school girls who were so fearful of seeming freakish themselves that they couldn’t afford to be seen with me, and in college I became a kind of pet project for the aspiring social workers that all the young women of college age seemed to be. They associated my cane with, who knows, old war wounds or something. They took the premature glints of white in my hair as a sign of mysterious past sufferings. As you might surmise, I had an allergy to this viewpoint, but usually at the outset I didn’t suspect that they held it. (Or didn’t let myself suspect.) I just gave myself over to what I fancied was true love. As soon as I grasped the situation, though, I would walk out. Or sometimes they would walk out, once they lost all hope of rescuing me. Then I graduated, and in the year and a half since, I had pretty much stuck to myself, taking care to avoid the various sweet young women that my family seemed to keep strewing in my path.

You see now why I found Dorothy so appealing — Dorothy, who wouldn’t even discuss the Mediterranean diet with me.

I went to her office a few days later to tour her treatment rooms, asking what if a patient had this kind of tumor, what if a patient had that kind of tumor. I went again with a list of follow-up questions that Dr. Worth had supposedly dictated to me. And after that, of course, I had to show her my rough draft over another dinner, this time at a place with better lighting.

Then a major development: I suggested we go to a movie the following evening. An outing with no useful purpose. She had a little trouble with that one. I saw her working to make the adjustment in her mind — switching me from “business” to “pleasure.” She said, “I don’t know,” and then she said, “What movie were you thinking of?”

“Whichever one you like,” I told her. “I would let you choose.”

“Well,” she said. “Okay. I don’t have anything better to do.”

We went to the movie — a documentary, as I recall — and then, a few days later, we went to another one, and after that to a couple more meals. We talked about her work, and my work, and the news on TV, and the books we were reading. (She read seriously and pragmatically, always about something scientific if not specifically radiological.) We traded the usual growing-up stories. She hadn’t been back to see her family in years, she said. She seemed amused to hear that I lived in an apartment only blocks away from my parents.

At that first movie I took her elbow to usher her into her seat, and at the second I sat with my shoulder touching hers. Leaning across the table to make a point to her over dinner, I covered her hand with mine; parting at the end of each evening, I began giving her a brief hug — but no more of a hug than I might give a friend. Oh, I was cagey, all right. I didn’t completely understand her; I couldn’t read her feelings. And already I knew that this was too important for me to risk any missteps.

In April I brought her a copy of The Beginner’s Income Tax, which was not really about taxes but about organizing receipts and such. She was hopelessly disorganized, she claimed; and then, as if to prove it, she forgot to take the book with her when we left the restaurant. I worried about what this meant. I felt she had forgotten me—easy come, easy go, she was saying — and it didn’t help that when I offered to turn the car around that minute and go retrieve it, she said never mind, she would just phone the restaurant later.

Did she care about me even a little?

Then she asked why I didn’t have a handicapped license plate. We were walking toward my car at the time; we’d been to the Everyman Theatre. I said, “Because I don’t need a handicapped license plate.”

“You’re bound to throw your back out of whack, walking the distances you do with that limp. I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened.”

I said nothing.

“Would you like me to fill in a form for the Motor Vehicle people?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Or maybe you’d prefer a hang-tag. Then we could switch it to my car if I were the one driving.”

“I told you, no,” I said.

She fell silent. We got into the car and I drove her home. By this time I knew where she lived — a basement apartment down near the old stadium — but I hadn’t been inside, and I had planned to suggest that evening that I come in with her. I didn’t, though. I said, “Well, good night,” and I reached across her to open her door.

She looked at me for a moment, and then she said, “Thank you, Aaron,” and got out. I waited till she was safely in her building and then I drove away. I was feeling kind of depressed, to be honest. I don’t mean I’d fallen out of love with her or anything like that, but I felt very low, all at once. Very tired. I felt weary to the bone.

Pursuing the theme of let’s-see-each-other’s-apartments, I had planned next to invite her to supper at my place. I was thinking I would fix her my famous spaghetti and meatballs. But now I put that off a few days, because it seemed like so much trouble. I would have to get that special mix of different ground meats, for one thing. Veal and so on. Pork. I didn’t trust an ordinary supermarket for that; I’d have to go to the butcher. It seemed a huge amount of effort for a dish that was really, when you came down to it, not all that distinctive.

I gave it a rest. I told myself I needed some space. Good grief, we’d gone out six evenings in the past two weeks — one time, twice in a row.

She telephoned me on Wednesday. (We’d last seen each other on Saturday.) She didn’t have my number and so she called Woolcott Publishing, and Peggy stuck her head in my door and said, “Dr. Rosales? On Line Two?”

She could have just buzzed me, but clearly she was wondering what a doctor could be calling me for. I refused to satisfy her curiosity. “Thanks,” was all I told her, and I waited till she was gone before I picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Dorothy.”

“Hello, Dorothy.”

“I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

This was more direct than I was comfortable with. I felt partly taken aback and partly, I have to say, admiring. Wasn’t it just like her!

“I’ve been busy,” I told her.

“Oh.”

“A lot of work piling up.”

“Well, I’d like to invite you to supper,” she said.

“Supper?”

“I would cook.”

“Oh!”

I don’t know why this was so unexpected. Somehow, I just couldn’t picture Dorothy cooking. But trying to picture it made me see her hands, which were very smooth across the backs in spite of her raspy fingers, and golden-brown and chubby. I was swept with a wave of longing. I said, “I’d love to come to supper.”

“Good. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

“Tonight?”

“Eight tonight.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Later — much later, when we were making our wedding plans — Dorothy told me all that had gone into that supper invitation. She began with her reason for issuing it: how she’d grown aware, in the four days when I didn’t call, of the extreme quiet and solitude of her existence. “I saw that I had no close friends, no family life; and at work they were always complaining about my failure to ‘interact,’ whatever that means.…” She described how she’d rearranged her apartment before my arrival, frantically shoving furniture every which way and stuffing books and papers and cast-off clothes into closets, into bureau drawers, wherever they would fit; and how she’d racked her brains over the menu. “All men like steak, right? So I called the Pratt Library’s reference section to see how to cook a steak. They suggested grilling or broiling, but I didn’t own a grill and I wasn’t all that clear about broiling, so they said okay, fry it in a pan.… And then the peas, well, that was no problem; everybody knows how to cook a box of peas.…”

But did she give the same amount of forethought to what we would talk about?

Oh, probably not. Probably that was just happenstance. After all, it was I who started things, when I commented on the size of her apartment. “This place is huge,” I said when I walked in. It was shabby but sprawling, with an actual dining room opening off the living room. “How many bedrooms do you have?”

“Three,” she told me.

“Three! All for one person!”

“Well, I used to have a roommate, but he moved.”

“Ah.”

I accepted the seat she offered me, at the end of a jangling metal daybed covered with an Indian spread. On the coffee table she had already set out wineglasses and a bottle of wine (Malbec, I saw), and she handed me the bottle along with a corkscrew. Then she sat down next to me. This close, I could smell her perfume, or her shampoo or something. She was wearing a scoop-necked black knit top I hadn’t seen before, along with her usual black trousers. I wondered if this was her version of dressing up.

It seemed her mind was still on her roommate. She said, “He moved because I wasn’t … doctorly enough.”

“Doctorly.”

“For instance, one time he said, ‘Everything I eat tastes too salty. Why do you think that could be?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘No, really: why?’ ‘Maybe it is too salty,’ I said. He said, ‘No, other people don’t think so. Is there anything that could be a symptom of?’ I said, ‘Well, dehydration, maybe. Or a brain tumor.’ ‘Brain tumor!’ he said. ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

I missed her point at first. She stopped speaking and looked at me expectantly, and I said, “What an idiot.”

“He would ask me to palpate a swollen gland,” she said after a pause, “or he’d wonder what his backache meant, a perfectly normal backache he got from lifting weights, or he’d want me to write a prescription for his migraines.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous!” I said. “He was your roommate, not your patient.”

Another pause. Then she said, “Actually, he was more like a … We were more like a couple, actually.”

This shouldn’t have come as a shock. She was a woman in her thirties; you would wonder what was wrong with her if there’d never been a man in her life. But somehow I had flattered myself that I was the very first one to appreciate her properly. I said, “You were a serious couple?”

She was following her own tack. She said, “I see now that he probably thought I wasn’t enough of a … caregiver.”

“Ridiculous,” I said again.

“So I said to myself, ‘I have to learn from that experience.’ ”

She still wore her expectant look.

This time, I got it.

I said, “Oh.”

“I wouldn’t want a person to think that I’m not … concerned.”

I said, “Oh, sweetheart. Dearest heart. I would never need you to be concerned for me.”

And I cupped her face and leaned forward to kiss her, and she kissed me back.

I could tell that people found Dorothy an unexpected choice.

My father said she was “interesting”—the same word he used when he was confronted with one of my mother’s more experimental casseroles.

My mother asked how old she was.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said.

(In fact, Dorothy was thirty-two. I was twenty-four and a half.)

“It’s only,” my mother said, “that I was thinking Danika Jones would have been closer to your own age.”

“Who?”

“Danika at work, Aaron. What do you mean, ‘Who?’ ”

Danika was our designer, the designer preceding Irene. My father had hired her as his final act before handing over the business, and all at once I thought I saw why. I said, “Danika! She wears toenail polish!”

“What’s wrong with that?” my mother asked.

“I always feel uneasy about women who polish their toenails. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.”

“Oh, Aaron,” my mother said sadly. “When will you understand how attractive you are? You could have any girl you wanted; someday you’re going to realize that.”

My sister said Dorothy was okay, she guessed, if you didn’t mind a woman with the social skills of a panda bear. That just made me laugh. Dorothy was a bit like a panda bear. She had that same roundness and compactness, that same staunch way of carrying herself.

Only I knew that underneath her boxy clothes, she was the shape of a little clay urn. Her skin had a burnished olive glow, and there was a kind of calm to her, a lit-from-within calm, that made me feel at rest whenever I was with her.

We were married in my family’s church, but just in the minister’s private office, with my parents and my sister as witnesses. Surprisingly, Dorothy had told me that it would be all right with her if I wanted something fancier, but of course I didn’t. The simpler the better, I felt. Simple and straightforward. And we didn’t take a honeymoon, because of Dorothy’s work schedule. We just went back to our normal lives.

It was early July when we married. We had known each other four months.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. “I mean early marriage,” he said. “The very start of a marriage. It’s like a whole new beginning. You’re entirely brand-new people; you haven’t made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this ‘we’ that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”

Dorothy still had her old name, and we were living temporarily in my old apartment, but in all other respects, what he said was true. Everything we did together in our new life was a first-time event, as if we had been reborn. On weekends, especially, when we didn’t go to work, I felt almost shiny, almost wet behind the ears, as we ventured forth upon the day. We ate breakfast together, we went to the supermarket together, we discussed whether we could afford to buy a house together. Could this really be me? Gimpy, geeky Aaron, acting like a regular husband?

And if I was surprised by myself, I was surprised even more by Dorothy. That she would consent to go shopping for something so prosaic as a vacuum cleaner, for instance — that she deigned to consider the merits of canister over upright — came as a revelation. As did the fact that she made a point of using the phrase “my husband” when speaking to strangers. “My husband thinks our vacuum should have a hypoallergenic filter.” That tickled me no end.

Also, she turned out to be a cuddler. Who would ever have guessed? She stayed nestled within the scoop of my body all night long, although you might suppose she’d be the brisk type once the sex was over. She kept close to me in crowds, often taking my hand surreptitiously as I stood talking with someone. I would feel those rough, pudgy fingers slipping stealthily between mine and I would have to struggle not to break into a smile.

I’m not saying that we didn’t encounter a few little bumps in the road. Every couple has to make some adjustments, isn’t that so? Especially when they’ve been accustomed to living on their own. Oh, we experienced our fair share of misunderstandings and crossed signals and faulty timing. On any number of occasions, we disappointed each other.

For one thing, I hadn’t completely comprehended before that Dorothy had zero interest in food. Zero. Not only did she almost never cook, which was fine with me, but she failed to appreciate what I cooked, which wasn’t fine at all. She would arrive at the table with a sheaf of mail that she opened and read between mouthfuls. “What do you think of the fish?” I would ask her, and she would say, “Hmm? Oh. It’s good,” without lifting her eyes from the letter she was reading.

And she lacked sufficient respect for physical objects. She gave no thought to their assigned places, to their maintenance and upkeep. She didn’t — how can I put it? She didn’t properly value things.

If she had properly valued me, for instance, wouldn’t she have taken more care with her appearance? It was true that I had been charmed at first by her lack of vanity, but now and then it struck me that she was looking almost, well, plain, and that this plainness seemed willful. As the months went by I found myself noticing more and more her clumsy clothes, her aggressively plodding walk, her tendency to leave her hair unwashed one day too long.

And Dorothy, for her part, seemed to find me unreasonably prickly. She’d say, “You’ll probably bite my head off, but …,” and then she’d finish with something innocuous, such as an offer to take a turn driving when we were on a long car trip. I’d say, “Why would you think that, Dorothy? Why would I bite your head off?” But unintentionally, I would be using a biting-her-head-off tone as I asked, because it irritated me when she tiptoed around my feelings that way. So, in fact, I’d proved her right. I could see it in her expression, although she would carefully not say so. And I would observe her not saying so, and I would feel all the more irritated.

It kills me now to remember these things.

I felt she expected something of me that she wouldn’t state outright. Her face would fall for no reason sometimes, and I would say, “What? What is it?” but she would say it was nothing. I could sense that I had let her down, but I had no idea how.

Once, she had a conference in L.A., but she said that she was thinking she might skip it. She didn’t like leaving me to manage on my own for so long, she said. (This was fairly early in our marriage.) I said, “Don’t skip it for my sake,” and she said, “Maybe you could come with me. Would you like that? They always have guided bus tours and such for the spouses during the day.”

“Great,” I said. “I could bring my knitting.”

“Oh, why be that way? I only meant—”

“Dorothy,” I said. “I was joking. Don’t worry about me. It’s not as if I depend on you to take care of me, after all.”

I meant that as a statement of fact. It wasn’t an accusation; who could read it as an accusation? But Dorothy did. I could tell by her face. She didn’t say anything more, and she got a sort of closed look.

I tried to smooth things over. I said, “But thanks for your concern.” It didn’t do any good, though. She stayed quiet throughout the evening, and the next day she left for her conference and I missed her like some kind of, almost, organ out of my body, and I think she missed me, too, because she phoned me from Los Angeles several times a day and she’d say, “What are you doing right now?” and, “I really wish you were here.” I wished I were there, too, and I couldn’t believe I had wasted that chance to be with her. I made a lot of promises to myself about being more easygoing in the future, not so quick to take umbrage, but then, when she came home, the very first thing she did was get mad at me about this thorn I had in my index finger. I’m serious. While she was gone I had cut back the barberry bush that was poking over the railing of our rear balcony, and you know how barberry thorns are so microscopic and so hard to get out. I figured it would just work its own way out, but it hadn’t yet, and my finger had started swelling and turning red. She said, “What is this? This is infected!”

“Yes, I think it must be,” I said.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said. “I have a thorn in my finger, okay? Sooner or later I’ll see this little black speck emerging and I’ll yank it. Any objections?”

“Yank it with what?” she asked.

“Tweezers, of course.”

“Yank it with what hand, Aaron? It’s in your left index finger. How are you going to work a pair of tweezers with your right hand?”

“I can do that,” I told her.

“You cannot. You should have asked someone for help. Instead you just … sat here, just sat here for a week, waiting for me to come home so I’d have to say, ‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry, how could I have left you on your own to deal with this?’ And everyone else would say, all your family and your office would say, ‘Look at that: she wasn’t even there to take his thorn out and now he has a major infection and maybe even will need an amputation, can you believe it?’ ”

“Amputation!” I said. “Are you nuts?”

But she just reached for the matchbox above the stove and went off to find a needle, and when she came back she leaned over my finger, her lips turned disapprovingly downward, my hand squeezed tightly in hers, and she pierced the skin one time and the thorn shot out like an arrow.

“There,” she said crisply, and she dabbed the wound with disinfectant.

Then she bent her head and pressed her cheek against the back of my hand, and her skin felt as soft as petals.

Well, we survived these little glitches. We papered over them, we went on with our lives. It’s true that we no longer had quite the same newborn shine, but nobody keeps that forever, right? The important thing was, we loved each other. All I had to do to remind myself of that was to cast my thoughts back to the moment we met. To my lonesome, unattached, unsuspecting self following the receptionist down the corridor of the Radiology Center. The receptionist comes to a stop and raps on a half-open door. Then she pushes it farther open, and I step through it, and Dorothy raises her eyes from her book. Our story begins.

I got up from Nandina’s couch and looked around for my cane, which I finally found propped in a corner. I let myself out the front door; I locked it behind me; I set off down the sidewalk.

Left onto Clifton Lane, left again on Summit and down to Wyndhurst. Then south on Woodlawn a good long way until I reached Rumor Road. My road, only three blocks long and lined with flowering pear trees. It was twilight by now, but I could still hear birds singing. One bird was calling out, “ ’Scuse me! ’Scuse me!” and insects were zipping away, keeping up that background clatter that you never really hear unless you stop to think about it.

I was developing a bit of an ache in the left side of my lower back, but that always happened when I walked any distance and I paid it no attention. I started walking even faster, because I knew that beyond the slight bend up ahead I would catch my first sight of our house. The bend was marked by a single tree of a different type from the others; I didn’t know the name. This tree bore huge pink, floppy flowers, and they were so abundant this year that I drew a deep breath as I approached it, expecting a strong perfume. I couldn’t detect one, though. Instead I smelled … Well, it was something like isopropyl alcohol, the faintest, most delicate scent of alcohol floating on the breeze, mixed with plain Ivory soap. The exact scent of my wife.

Then I rounded the bend, and I saw her standing on the sidewalk.

She was some ten feet away from me, facing our house and gazing at it, but when she heard my footsteps she turned in my direction. She was wearing her wide black trousers and a gray shirt. Both were the kind of colors that blended into the fading light, and yet she herself was absolutely solid — as solid as you or I, and in fact almost more so, in some odd way; solid and sturdy and opaque. I had forgotten that rebellious little quirk of black hair that stood up from the crown of her head. I’d forgotten how she always stood tipping a bit backward, ducklike, on her heels.

She watched me intently as I came nearer, with her chin slightly raised and her eyes fixed on mine. I arrived in front of her. I drew in a deep breath. I thought I would never in all my life smell a more wonderful combination than isopropyl alcohol and plain soap.

“Dorothy,” I said.

I’m not sure if I spoke aloud. I have a feeling I may have just thought it, in the very depths of my being.

I said, “Dorothy, my dear one. My only, only Dorothy.”

“Hello, Aaron,” she said.

She looked into my face for a moment, and then she turned and walked away. But I didn’t feel she was abandoning me. I knew, somehow, that she had stayed as long right then as she was able and that she would come again as soon as she could. So I stood still and watched her leave without attempting to follow. I watched her reach the end of the block, take a right on Hawthorn, and vanish.

Then I turned and started back to Nandina’s. I hadn’t so much as glanced at our house. What did I care about our house? I walked in a kind of trance, keeping my gait as nearly level as possible, as if Dorothy had been a liquid and now I was brimful of her and moving slowly and gently so as not to spill over.