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He wished this night, drugged in the living room, that he had been perfect, that he had made love with no one since he met Lydia on a blind date in La Jolla. He was a second lieutenant wearing dress blues, the date was for the Marine Corps birthday ball, and while his friend waited in the car, he s…

He took a sleeping pill and turned off the bedside lamp. He liked this new way of seeing the house, as if the entire structure were female and he entered it to be at its center with Lydia; and she had made a place for him, his den, as she gave him a place in her body. A great tenderness welled in h…

He looked at her eyes, and knew that what was falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: “No.”

“No what? I’m not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?”

“No, don’t do it.”

“I’m twenty-two years old, I’m going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking …

He was with her every night and, before her rehearsals started, they met for lunch and drank martinis and he was out of his office for two hours. On weekends he made picnic lunches and drove with her to the ocean. The water was cold, but the sun was warm and they wore sweatshirts and sat on the bea…

CALL HER CATHERINE. WHEN HER HEART truly broke, she was thirty-seven years old, she had two teenaged girls, and her husband loved another woman. She smelled the woman’s love on his clothes; it was a perfume she could name but did not. Even the woman’s name, when she learned it from her husband’s li…