“She must have some pussy.”

I caught myself before I could become angered by his remark. Instead, in my head I heard Victoire’s whispered “Je t’aime” and saw her green watercolor. “You have no idea,” I said.

“Tell me, does she make you feel younger? Is that part of this?”

On the face of it this was a reasonable enough question. I thought about it. “No,” I said. “In fact, I feel older. I would have to, wouldn’t I? But the thing is, I don’t care. She doesn’t care. She really doesn’t. So, I don’t care.”

“How moving.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

It was either in the yard, the kitchen, or the car, but Linda asked me a question so disturbing that where it was asked was unimportant. She asked, “If you could keep something like this from me, what other secrets are you hiding?”

Let’s say it was in the car, because there is no escaping a conversation made in an automobile. “I have no secrets,” I lied.

“No?” She laughed. “You’ve got one the size of a building in our yard.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“I never asked you about Paris,” she said.

“That was ten years ago.”

“What was ten years ago?”

“Paris,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Why did you have to be there?”

“That was ten years ago.”

She looked out the passenger side window. She hardly spoke to me after that. There were no accusations, there was no screaming, there was nothing, not even sighing. She yawned. The kids noticed the distance between their mother and me, but didn’t address it. How could they have? I thought that my, in my mind, ancient, infidelity had finally come home to roost. Metaphors are like oil paints: when you work wet they can get away from you.

I toyed with the idea of

The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.

“Here’s a question for you,” I said. “You find the perfect skipping stone.” I picked up a flat rock. “Say this is it. Imagine that this stone is beautifully flat, that it’s Payne’s gray in color, just like this one, oval but not egg-shaped. It’s made for the art of skipping.”

“Okay,” she said.

“It’s perfect. Do you throw it or keep it?”

“You throw it,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes.” She took the stone from me. “You can keep it until you die and then you’ll never see what it can do.”

“What if you mess up the toss?” I asked. “It just goes splash into the water. No skip, not even one.”

“How is that different from dying with it in your pocket?”

I looked at the water.

“You don’t agree?” she said.

“No, I agree completely.”

“So, what’s the point of all this?”

“About this baby thing.”

There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula. Back in Philadelphia I discovered bad dreams and fitful sleep. I locked myself away to explore those abstractions. My isolation wore well as I was an artist and artists were supposed to be moody and at least occasionally reclusive. The paintings I made I could just barely look at. I drank. When I emerged from my bed, so to speak, and went to my studio and revealed my paintings at my review, no one said a word. My professors, one after another, quietly, privately gave me nods of approval, then backed away as if something was wrong with me. They had no idea.

“I was so angry with you,” she said.

“I know.” I was pleased she had used the past tense. “I screwed up.”

“Not just about April,” she said. “I’ve been angry for years. You’ve just never been here.”

I listened. Before I might have become defensive, perhaps even hurt, but not now. She poured the tea. She was thirty years older than she was when we first met. She was slightly heavier. Her face was interestingly lined. Her hair was mostly gray. She had never been more beautiful than she was as she poured that tea. And I loved her. I understood that I had always loved her and I was so sad that I had never allowed her to feel that love.