Since my drunken fall in New York I have hardly any sense of smell. I read in Janet Malcolm about a patient of Freud’s whose sense of smell went away while she clung to unrealistic fantasies that her employer would return her love and marry her. I ask myself what my ‘unrealistic fantasies’ are, or rather, what I am declining to say bluntly to myself. And out it comes: ‘I regret having got married. I regret my loss of freedom.’ Okay. I regret it. But I also accept it, accept my regret, and decide consciously that I’ll try to stay married, and will make serious efforts to be more generous, less angry, less controlling, less reducing. I state to myself, too, that for all the faults I find in him V is a clever, funny, decent man who puts up with my craziness and tries to be kind to me. And that while there are thousands of ‘wrong’ men out there, there is no such thing as the ‘right’ man.