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again,” said Deborah. “You began to look all right for a little while, but now you look awful again.”
    “You don’t love me.”
    “Oh, not in the least.”
    “Do you know what it’s like to look at someone you love and see no love come back?”
    “It must be awful,” said Deborah.
    “It’s unendurable,” I said. Yes, the center was gone. In another minute I would begin to grovel.
    “It is unendurable,” she said.
    “You do know?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “You have felt it?”
    “There was a man I loved very much,” she said, “and he didn’t love me.”
    “You never told me that before.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    Before we married, she told me everything. She confessed every last lover—it had been her heritage from the convent: shehad done more than tell me, she had gone to detail—we would giggle in the dark while she tapped my shoulder with one cultivated and very learned finger, giving me a sense of the roll and snap and lurch and grace (or lack of it) in each of her lovers, she had even given me a sense of what was good in the best of them, and I had loved her for it, painful as the news had sometimes been, for I had known at least what I was up against, and how many husbands could ever say that? It was the warrant of our love; whatever our marriage had been, that was our covenant, that had been her way of saying I was more valuable than the others.
    And now she was inside me, fused at my center, ready to blow the rails.
    “You don’t mean it,” I said.
    “I do. There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
    “Who was the man?”
    “He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
    “You’re lying.”
    “Have it your way.”
    “It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
    “No, it wasn’t. It was someone far better than a bullfighter, far greater.” Her face had turned plump with malice, and the red mottling had begun to fade. “As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.”
    “Who could it be?” I asked.
    “Don’t bother to hop on one foot and then the other like a three-year-old who’s got to go to the Lou. I’m not going to tell you.” She took a sip of her rum, and jiggled the tumbler not indelicately, as if the tender circles of the liquor might transmit a message to some distant force, or—better—receive one. “It’s going to be a bore not having you here once in a while.”
    “You want a divorce,” I said.
    “I think so.”
    “Like that.”
    “Not like
that
, darling.
After
all that.” She yawned prettily and looked for the moment like a fifteen-year-old Irish maid. “When you didn’t come by today to say goodbye to Deirdre …”
    “I didn’t know she was leaving.”
    “Of course you didn’t know. How could you know? You haven’t called in two weeks. You’ve been nuzzling and nipping with your little girls.” She did not know that at the moment I had no girl.
    “They’re not so little any more.” A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode. “Give us a bit of the rum,” I said.
    She handed over the bottle. “Well, they may not be so little any more, but I doubt that, pet. Besides I don’t care. Because I made a vow this afternoon. I said to myself that I would never …” and then she did not speak the rest of the sentence, but she was talking about something she had done with me and never with anyone else. “No,” said Deborah, “I thought: There’s no need for that any more. Never again. Not with Steve.”
    I had taught it to her, but she had developed a pronounced royal taste of her own for that little act. Likely it had become the first of her pleasures.
    “Not ever again?” I asked.
    “Never. The thought—at least in relation to you,