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buy them all and arrange for overnight express delivery. 
    She yawns. She’s having fun of course but for her, maybe, it’s getting near bedtime. 
    She’s tired. So she walks around and proceeds to sit on my lap. 
    “Uh, not a good idea, Lily.” 
    “Why not?” She points at the screen. “I want that,” she says. 
    And I’m not sure I like either of these developments. 
    What she’s pointing to is a Baby Alive Doll. At forty bucks a Baby Alive Doll speaks thirty phrases and comes complete with a dress, a bib, a bowl, a spoon, a bottle, diapers, doll-food products -- whatever the hell they might be -- and instructions. 
    I imagine the instructions are useful. 
    The doll says, “I love you, Mommy,” and “kiss me, Mommy,” among other things. Eats, drinks, and wets its diaper. 
    I’m not sure I like that. I’m also not sure it’s wise to have her on my lap. I might have been better off when she distrusted me. Because right now this warm woman’s body, my wife’s body, is in serious danger of giving me a hard-on. 
    And this body thinks it’s about five or six years old. 
    “You’re too heavy,” I tell her. 
    “Am not.” 
    “Are so.” 
    “Am not.” 
    To prove it, I guess, she wriggles on me. Bumps gently up and down. 
    “Off,” I tell her. “You want me to buy this or not?” 
    “Oh, okay.” I’m a grouch. A spoil-sport.  
    She gets up. I buy the fucking doll. 
     
    I’m sitting in the chair in our guestroom watching her sleep. The moon is nearly full and through the window behind me it bathes her face in slants of milky white. The night’s unseasonably warm so she’s pulled the covers down to just below her waist and I can see her belly between her pajama top and bottom, her navel like a tiny pale button pressing up and down against the mattress cover. 
    My wife’s an outie. 
    I’m thinking about how we met, eight and half years ago. I’d just landed my first job in the publishing business, as a colorist for Arriveste Ventures -- garish, primary-color-only work on their Blazeman line. Nights I was brushing up on my anatomy at the adult ed department at Tulsa Community College and Sam, who already had four years under her belt in the coroner’s office, was guest lecturer. Her subject that night, the integumentary system. Skin. 
    A lot was familiar to me. That skin was the largest organ in the body. That skin was waterproofing, insulation, protection, temperature control, guard against pathogens, all rolled up into one. That skin was the organ of sensation. But there was something she said that I’d never considered before, at least not in the way she put it. 
    She said that skin permits us access to the outside world. 
    “All the orifices in our bodies,” she said, “our eyes, noses, ear canals, mouths, anuses, penises, vaginas, nipples -- they’re all there and function as they do because skin, by not covering them, allows them free communication with the world which is not us. Even our pores exist where they do and where they don’t, solely by permission of our skin. Pretty smart stuff, skin is.” 
    That got a laugh. But I thought that this Samantha Martin person was pretty smart stuff too.  
    And I was already thinking about her own skin, 
    It had been a year and a half since Linda had e-mailed me from New York saying -- apologetically but baldly -- that she’d fallen out of love with me. She didn’t know why. 
    Was there another man? No. Something I did or said? No. It just happened. She’d been meaning to tell me for a while now but hadn’t gotten up the courage. I was twenty-four years old and we’d been lovers for four of those years. I was still completely crazy over her. Those seven stages of grief they talk about? I went through all seven at once I think, rattling from one to the other like a game of bumper-pool gone berserk. At the end of it, I more or less vowed that love and even sex could wait. Until I was thirty, maybe. 
    But then