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while spending her parents’ money. Our relationship had traced a perfect thermodynamic arc: in six months we’d burned away everything but memories and an odorless wisp of ash. After that, I lost touch with her, and heard only rumors—of substance abuse, of several attempts at resurrecting a career in rock and roll, and of a brief sighting of her hooked up, incredibly, with a wealthy older dentist.
    “How’s Lucy?” she now asked.
    The question seemed a bit abrupt. “She’s fine,” I said, “just fine.”
    “That’s good,” she said, and then after a pause, “isn’t it?”
    Alone in my study, I smiled at the familiarly blunt swerve of the conversation. Social niceties had never been Belinda’s forte. A bomb dropper by nature, she was blunt, confrontational and indifferent to the normative expectations of “chat.” This drop-dead volatility was one of the things I’d always loved about the girl. We talked for another few minutes, and I found myself growing familiarly warm and expanded on the phone. By the time we hung up, we were both laughing hard. When I went out to the kitchen, Lucy was at the table, paging through a magazine, pretending to ignore me. The boys, playing in the backyard, were making the shrieking sounds of raptors diving on prey.
    “I just spoke to Belinda,” I said.
    “Oh?” She raised her eyes at me over the magazine.
    “Yeah. She’s feeling pretty broken up, as you can imagine.”
    “Poor thing.”
    “I’m going to see her sometime next week.”
    Lucy put down the magazine.
    “See her?” she asked.
    “Yes, she’s coming into town and we’ll have a condolence cup of tea.”
    “Well, isn’t that lovely,” she said, and braced her hand on the magazine and began intently studying her fingers, “please give her my regards.”
    “I will.”
    “Is she still fat?”
    “Honey, please.”
    “I never understood how one could be addicted to speed and still be overweight. Can you explain that?”
    I sighed. “This is not helpful, Lucy.”
    “Helpful? Who said helpful? She’s just so”—Lucy wrinkled her lips—“ yuuuch, isn’t she? Have yourself deloused after you see her, Nicky, and by the way, please keep her away from the boys.”
    I shook my head wearily. “Is this really necessary?” I said. “I mean do we have to be quite this juvenile?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucy responded mysteriously, “do we?”
     
    O VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, MY WIFE CONTINUED TO be short with me, and aloof as well. When her pride is wounded, she tends to react in just this way: by growing spitefully correct, formal and self-contained. The dinners served with quivering punctuality accompanied by taut mealtime conversation on the issues of the day; the perfectly squared piles of my freshly laundered shirts; therigid arrangements of the boys’ toys—I know the drill well, in all its hollow normality. More than hollow, it’s punitive at bottom. And it works. In fact, it kind of kills me. I suffer when Lucy is like this. I suffer because it hurts to be marginalized by my life partner, and also because her predicament—its fraughtness, its nerved aloneness—nearly cripples me with the force of my own sympathetic response (roped to my awareness that I’ve probably grown too lazy, stalled or self-involved to do much about it). This is part of my problem in life, generally, this passive overabundance of seeing-it-from-the-other-side. Lucy was threatened by Belinda’s wildness, and the way it attacked the codes by which she’d tried to run her own life. But she’d be damned if she’d admit it. In the early phases of our marriage, I would have tried simply to say, Darling, it’s quite obvious. You dislike her because she’s a risk taker, a wild and untamed spirit and is utterly uninvested in those social arrangements you hold so dear, but I love you, so who cares?
    But our years together have curbed my enthusiasm for these kinds of dramatic reconciliations. Besides, truth, at least