[...] a writer twenty years older who e-mailed daily love notes like exquisite novels in miniature but in the end said he was too old for her he had divorce kids he had moss growing on his antlers it would never work he was too old.

[...] He hopes, right now, that I am pregnant. He says I'm probably a month gone, he can tell by the flab around my belly button. I think maybe it's just flab, from eating donuts and lying around all day. But we're making money. We can book appointments.

"But you can adopt," she suggests. "You can babysit."

[...]

"We can't adopt," Dewey says. "We're poor. They'd never give us a baby."

The wife's angry driving, the husband has noticed, becomes far worse when they must travel together on their way to marriage counseling. They must travel together on their way to marriage counseling because two weeks ago the husband wrecked their other car, and during this wreck both the husband and his passenger, a pale young woman from the city, sustained injuries that required immediate attention at the local hospital, which was not in fact very local at all, but quite a distance away from the hotel address that the husband had given his wife when they discussed his going to the business conference scheduled for that ill-fated weekend. And despite the relative ease with which the hospital staff treated the patients, for the two had responsibly belted themselves into the car for their first ever romantic drive, the difficulty of explaining to his wife these less than ideal circumstances caused the greatest injury of all.

He misses his wife. Not the wife that has lived with him for these past two weeks, and not the wife that became hysterical with the desire to have children, but the wife, his wife, the woman he met in the grocery store parking lot, who needed help changing a flat, the woman who rode in the ambulance with him after the car collapsed on his foot.

The husband stands alone in the midst of all the children and, as he looks around, suddenly all the signs in the children's hands seem directed at him. STOP, the signs say in childish block letters, and this alarms him. Wait, he thinks, stop what? And how? Never mind stop being a coward, how did he first become one? His relief at avoiding any further confrontation gives way to the terrifying sense that he is too late to arrest the skidding disaster of his life, that he could not possibly know where to begin such an overwhelming endeavour.

Why did you do that, he says to the girl, after the taillights of his wife's car disappear around a bend in the road.

Now she has to forgive you, she says.

Isn't that what you wanted, she says.

I don't know anymore, he says.

...and I'd like to add that will teach all the classes, I will crave the eight o'clock I will teach whatever you want, Fuji Island Poetry, gator wrestling, Lamaze, all within my range. [...]

I'll go to every meeting I can find. I'll be perky and upbeat, bye-bye despair. I will not silently mouth the words I want to die. I will chortle when others chortle, stop when they stop, sick smile stuck on my face like the Joker. I will be a frisky Marxist, an ersatz Francophile [...]

The entire Chicago Voice Center staff is warm, sharp, and highly knowledgeable [...] As soon as he walks through the doors a calm washes over his entire person.

For this reason, Alex has considered increasing the frequency of his visits, but also doesn't want to put Dr. Gail D. Schonberg out anymore than he already does. [...]

For this reason, Alex has considered therapy. [...]

For this reason, Alex has considered becoming a weekly patient at another laryngology practice [...]

For this reason, Alex has considered outfitting himself with a Johnson Smith Mustache & Beard Kit in order to attempt registering himself as a new weekly patient of The Chicago Voice Center, giving him the benefit of two check-ups per week sans the betrayal and undercutting. This idea is so inherently flawed and misguided that it sometimes leads Alex to mentally chuckle and reflect on the humor of his larynx-related situation. [...]

For this reason, Alex has considered dropping by The Voice Center just to sit in the waiting room and read The Journal of Voice. [...] the even more uncomfortable uncomfortable aspect of feeling that his being there "just to sit and enjoy their extensive library and uncharacteristically comfortable waiting-room chairs" is the hot topic of staff conversation.

For this reason, Alex has considered dropping by The Voice Center just to sit in the waiting room and read The Journal of Voice while outfitted in a Johnson Smith Mustache & Beard Kit.

[...] Calculus was realizing that something you had previously understood to be true in only a silly, facile way really had deep roots furled out underneath it that proved its worth and fireworks that shot up out of it too, newer and more complicated and more beautiful than what you had known before. And the roots and the fireworks talked to one another across the night air in a lyrical, sensible language. And assuming you did things as they were meant to be done, everything worked out perfectly. [...]

[...] I felt like people should do what they wanted to and not what other people would prefer. I've rethought this position over the years, though, and done an about-face. I realized that while every individual is basically forced into a relationship with himself (when you eat dinner in a restaurant by yourself, you're sort of going on a date with yourself), other people have the option to refuse. So it's other people you should be trying to impress. Being yourself can work if what you are happens to be something good, but if what you are is something lousy, then you should probably try to be something else.