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ritual seemed to go on forever. During the day I called June June. I took her and Susannah to the YWCA, where they swam and made macramé wall hangings. I took them shopping. I went to Montauk with them, where an old friend of mine had the very last house before the Island petered out into the sea. In the nonexistent traffic there, I taught June to drive.
    Preoccupied, I tried to imagine my life without Langley. I could not. For without Langley all of it was just going through the motions, following the dictate of the voice in my ear, the emptiness in my soul. But there was no warmth without her, no fire. No rebellion of my own angel to enjoy. No surprise.
    She became so weak from her grief that when she stepped over me in the mornings, she stumbled. She was eating next to nothing. I was the same. I think we both had fevers, for our nightly exertions took their toll.
    I begged her to let me take care of her. She laughed, a mean laugh. And tossed her hair, which since our return from Mexico she’d both straightened and bobbed. In her plum-colored silk pajamas and fluffy-toed mules she was a different woman—which I found amazing and almost unbearably exciting. She had also begun taking courses in comparative anthropology at the local college. It drove me crazy not to be making love to her and, while loving her, learning her new thoughts.
    I decided to learn golf.
    It did not work. I disliked the cap. The cart. The balls. And hadn’t I heard somewhere that the green itself, because of the chemicals used to keep it so, was toxic?
    One morning she did not leave her room. By then I had dragged my mattress from my room and slept on it just beside her door. After half an hour of waiting, I went inside. Surprised to find that the door was not locked. She could not get out of bed. Seeing this, I felt—it is almost impossible to describe, except to say I felt the mother in me fully ripen and rise to the occasion. Suddenly I was all over the room at once, tending to Langley; changing the sheets, opening the windows, adjusting the curtains, picking up newspapers and books from the floor. Then, down in the kitchen, I made soup, squeezed oranges, made toast. Got the children out of the house. Then I came back, watched Langley eat, tucked her in, and went to my room to dress.
    During the day I looked in on her. Fed her. Went to the market for anything she said she had a hankering for—the father in me loving the activity of sallying forth! And in the evening I draggedout all the records we’d stored in her parents’ basement before we went to Mexico, the records to which we’d danced before the voice in my head got the better of me, and I lit a candle, only one because it was so hot, and Langley had by now reverted to the woman I knew. The heat had made her hair go back to its naughty kinkiness, and perspiration had ruined the silk pajamas, and she didn’t know where the mules were, and she loved being naked anyhow.
    And now I waited. I was waiting to see in Langley’s brown eyes, which sometimes looked maroon, if she still wanted me, old man, sinner, beast, creature that I was. If she remembered how it felt to be with me. To be pinned to the bed by me. To be herself riding me. Did she think of the taste of me, which she said she loved, or remember the feeling of me tasting her, my tongue eager and intent as a spaniel’s? Or did she remember how hot nights made loving even better because bodies stuck together? And there was more noise and slipperiness and more moisture of all kinds to absorb. And did she remember my telling her, when we made love, and she gave herself completely to me,
Baby I love you and Baby I love you is the most erotic thing I know?
    Naked, nappy, bright-eyed, and almost well, she began to study me. I felt it immediately. She did it when my back was turned. On my way to the kitchen. Out the door to the store. Bending to retrieve the spoon she’d dropped. The one