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I’ll have to take the car, so maybe you should stay in town.”
    “Well, if I stay in town you can stay at the house. But I still don’t see—”
    “No. No, I cannot. I absolutely cannot stay in this house. I cannot stay in this house for another moment. I can’t. Howie, I don’t know what’s happening to me but I have to let it happen by myself.”
    He was saying something else. I didn’t let him finish. I hung up and broke the connection, and then I took the phone off the hook so it wouldn’t ring again.
    After that it was amazing how cool I was. I mean that it amazes me now that I think about it. I packed a suitcase. I threw clothes into it. I found the birth control pills that I had stopped taking when we decided I would stop taking them, and I took one right away and put the rest in my purse. I had dressed after making love (I don’t mean making love, we didn’t make love, we screwed) and I was wearing—oh, really who cares? Who cares what I was wearing?
    I almost forgot this book, my diary. I haven’t written anything in it in two weeks. (Until now, when I seem intent on filling the whole thing at one sitting.) I had been keeping it on a shelf in my closet, a shelf Howie was unlikely to browse over. I came across it while gathering up clothes, and something made me realize I would want it. So I put it in the suitcase.
    I lugged the suitcase out to the car—I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out, he had done a superb job of snow shoveling—and went back for my purse and the bankbook. I stopped in the bathroom and had a long look at the mirror. I had virtually had an affair with that mirror since my jump in the hay with what’s-his-name (my God, I really don’t know his name, we really never did get around to names, isn’t that hysterical!) and I kept running to look at myself in the mirror to see if I looked different. It really was like losing my virginity. I had kept looking in mirrors then too, just as I had done years earlier when I got my period for the first time. You always look to see if you look different, I guess everyone does that. I don’t think I look any different now but I keep checking.
    Anyway, I took out my lipstick and wrote on the mirror. I wrote Howard and put a dash after it, and then I couldn’t think of anything to write, not a single thing. I was going to wipe it out but I didn’t get around to it, so it’s there to greet him if he comes home tonight after all, or it’ll greet him some other time, whenever he does come home, and I can’t imagine what will go through his mind when he sees it. Just that I’m out of my mind, I guess, which we both know now anyway.
    Question: If you know you’re nuts, then are you really?
    Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.
    I closed our savings account, or rather I took all but twenty dollars out of it, so it’s not officially closed but it might as well be. I have almost four thousand dollars in cash plus a purse full of credit cards, so I can go anywhere and do anything and sooner or later Howard will pay for it. Which is not nice of me, and if I figure out whether I love him or hate him or what, maybe I’ll do something more concrete about it. I don’t even know what that last sentence means. I’m slipping into automatic writing and besides my arm hurts.
    I’m going to have a few more drinks and go to sleep.
    February 20
    I have an apartment. In New York, but I don’t think there’s any chance that I’ll run into Howard. His office is on Forty-eighth between Madison and Fifth, his train leaves from Grand Central, and he rarely if ever goes out of that vicinity. (How do I know that, really? For all I know he could have a mistress in the same building I’m living in, and have her for lunch five days a week. But I doubt it.)
    I am living in Greenwich Village. Grove Street, the West Village, very ultradesirable location. I sublet it from some sculptor who’s going to Chile on a grant. I don’t know how he