On Monday I recovered the power of speech and began to work alongside him in the studio, but we did not clear out inside. We were polite to one another at dinner, and even for an hour afterward in the living room. Then he went to bed and I stayed up reading. When I lay down beside him, he was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. In the days that followed, the awful politeness gave way to a kind of strained considerateness. The strain, like low-grade infection, was bearable. We accustomed ourselves to an atmosphere of domestic tension I thought would dissipate momentarily. I’d wake up and say to myself: ‘Today. Today it comes to an end.’ But then I’d get out of bed and the air would start filling up with that mild molecular misery.