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Brossman.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. I don’t care.’
    This amounted to permission, but perversely irritated him. That above-it-all quality; why didn’t she
fight
? Trying to regain their peace, scrambling uphill, he picked up their check and with an effort of acting, the pretense being that they were out on a date and he was a raw dumb suitor, said handsomely, ‘I’ll pay.’
    But on looking into his wallet he saw only a single worn dollar there. He didn’t know why this should make him so angry, except the fact somehow that it was only
one
. ‘Goddamn it,’ he said. ‘Look at that.’ He waved it in her face. ‘I work like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats and at the end of it what do I have? One goddamn crummy wrinkled dollar.’
    Her hands dropped to the pocketbook beside her on the seat, but her gaze stayed with him, her face having retreated, or advanced, into that porcelain shell of uncanny composure. ‘We’ll both pay,’ Joan said.

TWIN BEDS IN ROME
    THE MAPLES HAD talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.
    They arrived at night. The plane was late, the airport grand. They had left hastily, without plans; and yet, as if forewarned of their arrival, nimble Italians, speaking perfect English, took their luggage in hand, reserved a hotel room for them by telephone from the airport, and ushered them into a bus. The bus, surprisingly, plunged into a dark rural landscape. A few windows hung lanternlike in the distance; a river abruptly bared its silver breast beneath them; the silhouettes of olive trees and Italian pines flicked past like shadowy illustrations in an old Latin primer. ‘I could ride this bus forever,’ Joan said aloud, and Richard was pained, remembering, from the days when they had been contenttogether, how she had once confessed to feeling a sexual stir when the young man at the gas station, wiping the windshield with a vigorous, circular motion, had made the body of the car, containing her, rock slightly. Of all the things she had ever told him, this remained in his mind the most revealing, the deepest glimpse she had ever permitted into the secret woman he could never reach and had at last wearied of trying to reach.
    Yet it pleased him to have her happy. This was his weakness. He wished her to be happy, and the certainty that, away from her, he could not know if she were happy or not formed the final, unexpected door barring his way when all others had been opened. So he dried the very tears he had whipped from her eyes, withdrew each protestation of hopelessness at the very point when she seemed willing to give up hope, and their agony continued. ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ he said now.
    ‘You can’t let me relax a minute, can you?’
    ‘I’m sorry. Do relax.’
    She stared through the window a while, then turned and told him, ‘It doesn’t feel as if we’re going to Rome at all.’
    ‘Where are we going?’ He honestly wanted to know, honestly hoped she could tell him.
    ‘Back to the way things were?’
    ‘No. I don’t want to go back to that. I feel we’ve come very far and have only a little way more to go.’
    She looked out at the quiet landscape a long while before he realized she was crying. He fought the