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what was most unfair about it was that it was nobody’s fault. There were no villains, no excuses, no nothing, and she was going crazy. Something had to give. There was no solution, short of death. And she was not prepared to die. He was healthier than anyone else she knew. Why shouldn’t he be: she, as he’d put it so often, repeating the phrase till she could scream, “completed” him. Completed him. Was that even fair to him, assuming it was true? What sort of life could he possibly have, when both of them were so alienated, and the crucial difference was that she had had over forty years to acclimate herself to it, even view it with a certain wry detachment, whereas he, being a child of the sixties with all that that entailed, thought there was no reason on earth why he should acclimate himself to anything? Why shouldn’t they just be happy? Wasn’t that what it was all about? Hadn’t they found it in each other? But we aren’t supposed to he happy , she wanted to scream.
    She thought about it all the time. How could he not notice? Had he gone senile? Maybe his whole generation was senile, with their Beatles and drugs and notions of happiness as some inalienable birthright instead of an occasional holiday that sneaks up on you while you figure out a way to fuck it up. She was just too set in her ways. Whereas he could bend to anything, and did, regularly. Which was one of the main reasons why she was beginning to feel like a mother. Who the hell was she to remake and define his whole life? Yet that was seemingly exactly what he wanted. What else was there for him? It was sickening. Once they were alike; now they were both her. One was more than enough.
    One day she sat down and made a list of possible solutions:
    (1) Commit suicide. Then he would be free . Unacceptable. As pointless as life was, she had no intention of checking out until absolutely necessary. Besides, who was to say that he might not kill himself in grief immediately thereafter, becoming her shadow even in death?
    (2) Confront him. Tell him she couldn’t stand it anymore. Then ask for his advice . Trouble was, she suspected he wouldn’t have any. He had externalized his own emptiness to the point he thought she was perfect. Perfect. Some joke that was. A forty-six-year-old divorcée and intermittent alcoholic subject to chronic depression and conviction that life is meaningless and empty, an individual with zero interests, no skills, shit job, ex-hooker, no children, now carrying on an obviously deeply sick relationship with a boy almost twenty years her junior, half her age. Maybe she had let the whole mess get started in the first place simply as a hedge against the fact she’d never had children. Now she had a son. Whom she fucked. Who imitated her in every way he knew how. Lord help us. If this was perfection, give me a country of miscreants, mutants, psychos, and cripples.
    (3) Demand they break up . Break his heart. Deprive him of his sole reason for staying alive. HURT HIM . And herself as well, no doubt about it. Back to the office and the papers and slimy men making hideous propositions over chili dogs? The coffee klatch? Bach and Mozart, even? She’d rather kill herself. She would have nothing to live for in that case. Yet somehow she got by before him. How? She could not remember.
    (4) Force herself to develop some new outside interest which was sure to alienate him . A cult? Antirock crusade? Right-wing politics? Jesus freaks? The Chamber of Commerce? Fascinating Womanhood? She would rather learn bass (as he had in fact even on occasion urged her, for Christ’s sake) and join his damn rock band. And she hated his singing as well as his songs. She would rather be dead.
    (5) Kill him . At least if she did it right, he’d never know what hit him, never know unhappiness for the rest of his life. But she had no right to do this. Besides, it would break her heart; she would kill herself first. Besides, she couldn’t stand the thought