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family ties, and, more than friendship, love. That sounded right. So they dropped their defenses and relaxed into all the good stuff, and never saw the hidden twisting in him, the dreadful torque of his doubt, until the day he snapped and the alien burst out of his stomach, baring multiple rows of teeth. They never saw the end coming until it hit them. His first wife, Sara, the one with the graphic verbal gift, put it thus: “It felt like an ax-murder.”
    “Your trouble is,” Sara incandescently said near the end of their last quarrel, “that you’re really only in love with those fucking dolls. The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can handle. The world you can make, unmake, and manipulate, filled with women who don’t answer back, women you don’t have to fuck. Or are you making them with cunts now, wooden cunts, rubber cunts, fucking inflatable cunts that squeak like balloons as you slide in and out; do you have a life-size fuck-dolly harem hidden in a shed somewhere, is that what they’ll find when one day you’re arrested for raping and chopping up some golden-haired eight-year-old, some poor fucking living doll you played with and then threw away. They’ll find her shoe in a hedge and there’ll be descriptions of a minivan on TV and I’ll be watching and you won’t be home and I’ll think, Jesus, I know that van, it’s the one he carries his fucking toys around in when he goes to his perverts’ I’ll-show-you-my-dolly-if-you’ll-show-me-yours reunions. I’ll be the wife who never knew a thing. I’ll be the fucking cow-faced wife on TV forced to defend you just to defend myself, my own unimaginable stupidity, because after all, I chose you.”
    Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury-sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal-drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.
    Her name was Lear, Sara Jane Lear, some sort of distant relative of the writer and watercolorist, but there wasn’t a trace of antic Edward’s immortal nonsense in her. How pleasant to know Sara Lear, who remembers such volumes of stuff! Some folks think her awfully queer, but I find her pleasant enough. The revised verse didn’t raise the ghost of a smile. “Imagine how many times people have recited those exact words to me and you’ll excuse me for not being impressed.” She was a year or so his senior and was writing a thesis on Joyce and the French nouveau roman. In her second-floor flat on Chesterton Road, “love”-which in retrospect looked more like fear, a mutual clutching at the life belt of the other while drowning in twenty-something loneliness-made him plow his way twice through Finnegan’s Wake. Also the dour pages of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor. When he looked up miserably from the great heaps of their slow, obscure sentences, he found her watching him from the other armchair, turning in his direction that angular devil-mask of a face, beautiful but sly. Sly-eyed lady of the Fenlands. He couldn’t read her expression. It might have been contempt.
    They married too quickly for thought and felt trapped by the mistake almost immediately. Yet they stayed together for several miserable years. Afterward, when he told the story of his life to Eleanor Masters, Solanka cast his first wife as the one with the exit strategies, the player most likely to resign the game.