And then one night, when you were about to leave for the island where you spend your weeks at Christmas, and your wife was already there but your children, the last of whom has now grown up, were not this year going with you, I said, I’m afraid I said, You know, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a night, in a single night after a day of tiredness and errands, and before an early morning of more errands and long absence, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a single night if someday we had a week. It was late. We were drunk, though not very. And then I said, You know. You said, What. I said, I guess we are never going to have a week. And then I’m afraid I wept. We were quiet then, as we usually are. But there are things you can say, I think, or suggest, or even contemplate aloud just once. And I had begun. So I said, because after all these years I had to say something, though it may be far too late to say it, When it’s time for me to go, do you want me to ask you or tell you or should I just quietly go. You said, But I don’t want you to go, I need you here. I said, No, and in a way you’ve wanted me to go for years, and I’ve known it, but I just couldn’t do it. Then you said, not speaking as to a child any longer, But you can’t go, everything will just disintegrate if you go. I was touched, and I said whatever I said, about how bored you are sometimes. You said, But you always have something new to tell me; and if you go I’ll just shrivel up, I’ll just shrivel up like a prune. We went to sleep. And by morning, of course, you had forgotten. Remembered by afternoon, I think, only that I had been unhappy, remembered a phrase or two, but remembered by then as though it were a childhood thing, one of your daughters homesick at school, perhaps, or briefly sentimental at parting when you and their mother went away, or, more recently, when they went away themselves, to their men or their jobs, abroad. So it was only as if I had said once again that while you were gone I would miss you. And we have said that so often, everyone says it, in such a formula way, it has almost no meaning. And to make me feel better, you said again that you loved me, and gave me, as a sort of Christmas present, that word about your having made love only with me in all these years. And I could not, how could I, turn away, so I just said, Not anyone? and then, Neither have I.