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just happened on the bed, and with the skateboarding girl underneath?
    Francie’s most vulnerable spot, in three acts. Act one: the months of frequent, if not passionate—how could it be passionate when it was regulated by doctors, ovulation calendars, thermometers?—fucking that had preceded the discovery that it was Roger’s fault. Not fault, but contained in his body: low sperm count, and what sperm there were, deformed. Act two: sex in a petri dish, forcing the coupling of her eggs with the best of the deformed sperm—also a failure. Act three: a conversation repeated many times in different words, but first held as they left the doctor’s office for the last time. Francie:
I guess that leaves us with adoption
. Roger:
What would be the point of that?
    That same act three might have done double duty as the beginning of the last act of their marriage as well, a long, attenuated denouement with this twist of Roger’s job loss at the end, and a second twist after that, if you counted Ned. Roger’s question—
What would be the point of that?—
had illuminated some long-concealed but essential difference between them, masked by Roger’s early dominance: his intelligence, education, worldliness, and his good manners, which she’d perhaps mistaken for kindness. Would a child have made it all better? Francie didn’t know; she just knew she had wanted one, wanted one still. Roger, in the end, had wanted to pass on his genes.
    Francie thought again of Em: how she would like to meet her, even see her from a distance. Her mind moved on to Ned and quite abruptly, like a heat-seeking detector, to that earlier inappropriate mental image of his penis. Magnificent, like those on a Grecian urn—or were they too mannered? The comparison was probably to some simpler art, more robust, more iconic, even primitive: the Sumerians, perhaps; a Babylonian stone carving, for example.
    My God,
she thought suddenly.
How can I be thinking of sex?
But she was. Ned drove everything else out of her mind; he was deep inside her, and not even there. After a while, her body unfolded, her hand came up under the flannel nightie, and she found herself as ready as she’d ever been. What was this all about? The power of love, she decided, strong enough to keep Ned with her all the time, Roger reduced to nothing. A calming thought, but the glowing numbers on her clock kept changing, and still she didn’t sleep. She picked up the phone and called the only person she could call at that hour.
    “Hello?” said a sleepy-sounding man.
    “Bernie?” Francie said.
    “Yeah?”
    “What’s your last name, Bernie?”
    “Zymanzki, with two Z’s. Do I know you?”
    “Put Nora on.”
    Rustling sounds, fumbling, a grunt. And Nora:
    “Francie?”
    “Yup.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Tell me about divorce.”
    “I’m a big believer; you know that. I believe in it more than I believe in marriage.”
    “And in my case?”
    “Unless I’m missing something, it’s long overdue. Stop it, Bernie.”
    Nora paused for a moment, long enough for Francie to supply the missing piece. She remained silent.
    “Francie?” said Nora. “Are you crying?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    Pause. “I’ve got a court on Tuesday, sugar, five-thirty.We’ll talk.”
    *    *    *
    Francie lay awake all night, got up at dawn. She dressed, packed her briefcase, went downstairs to Roger’s door. She knocked. No answer. She opened the door. The room was dark, except for the glow of the computer screen. Roger sat before it, his back to her.
    “Roger?”
    No reply. No sound but the tapping of his fingers on the keys.
    “It’s time to talk about divorce.”
    No reply. The tapping didn’t stop. Perhaps he bent a little closer to the screen. Francie closed the door and left.
    Roger stopped typing, leaving twenty-nine across—hell, in ideal form—blank. He went upstairs, into her bedroom—their bedroom—suddenly felt dizzy, sat on the bed. As the dizziness passed, Roger