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TIME CAME when he was ready to sleep and set the alarm. Janice had always woken early and meditated downstairs and then awakened him. He was never good at waking, because he never got enough sleep. He set the radio to KYW-1060, all news. Janice hated all news. “How can you make love at night and then wake up to all news?” she used to ask him, back when they made love each night. “It’s too
hard.”
    “Well, we’re hard people,” he had said.
    “You’re the one who’s hard.”
    He flicked off the light and swam through the sudden darkness to the bed. Under the covers, he felt a little more of eleven years’ worth ofJanice leak out: the last year of college together, she at Penn on scholarship, he on the parental ticket, then living separately, then shacking up—his parents had been relaxed about it—then marriage in the three-hundred-year-old Quaker Meeting his family belonged to, saying their vows in the simple pale room with their friends silently watching.
In the presence of God and these our friends I take thee Janice to be my wedded wife.
He had been faithful, made a decent living, been a good lover. But he had overworked himself and been too tired on Sundays to go out for a picnic in Fairmount Park when she suggested it, and he had shown only a shabby interest in her struggle to define herself. He’d been noncommittal when she brought up children, not because he didn’t care, but because increasingly he’d felt like such a failure with her. Janice had looked to him for the elemental affirmation her parents had never given her. After all, he was the one from a good family, the life of privilege. He’d enjoyed advantages that made him believe his needs were not as significant as hers, which was a good thing, for she had been unable to reach beyond her own decimated family history. She had needed to
feel
loved and hadn’t found it. Not in him, not in herself. He seemed only to torment her through his deficiencies; and so he had started to withdraw, dry up a little more each year. Janice was increasingly flush with the social-work jargon; sooner or later, he’d long hoped, she’d stop looking for issues in their marriage to “work on,” like a mechanic tinkering with an engine, and realize he was a regular, decent guy who loved her in a mundane, unconditional way. Was that so bad?
    Wondering where the hell she was, he rolled around the bed in frustration, then forced himself to lie flat on his back. It was impossible to remove the sensation of bed from the sensation of her. His penis, trained dog that it was, hardened. He lay beneath the blanket giving it a bit of incidental attention, thinking about how Janice used to kiss him and jump up from bed to go put in her diaphragm and on her way to the doorway he could see that little sweet curve right inside between her thighs, and while she was in the bathroom he would loll around the sheets letting the day disappear, feeling swollen and satisfied and happy. She’d come back in, with the faint medicinal stink of the goop, and even this smell was mildly aphrodisiacal, by association. She’d never gone onthe Pill, although her gynecologist had suggested it. Peter and Janice used to fight good-naturedly and then not so good-naturedly about who would buy the fat white tubes of the stuff. He hated some of the looks he got doing it. Janice thought his buying it was “sharing.” The least
he
could do, considering all the mess
she
went through. She was right, yes, but still it embarrassed him. He was tired of being slimy afterward and had always half-consciously resented her for not using the Pill. It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to purchase birth control you hated to use, though the irony was, of course, that it was Janice who wanted children. Finally one Saturday morning he’d driven to a drugstore and bought twenty large-size tubes, hoping he would get Janice to clam up that way and not have to buy any more stuff for maybe three