In retrospect, the trip to the city had been a ridiculous idea. After all, the beginning of the beginning of the end had started on a trip to New York. On the train, he tried to engage Miranda with complaints about the departmental budget cuts, but all she wanted to talk about was this wonderful Wittgenstein she was learning about in her college course. ‘“Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use its breath?”’ she said, an eager sheen in her eye. ‘Well?’

‘I didn’t think I needed to respond,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have to do with real life at all.’

‘Maybe when you say you didn’t think you needed to respond, you didn’t need to. Maybe I needed you to respond.’

‘Is this still philosophy or do you just talk like that now?’

‘Jesus, Bill.’

‘What?’ He looked at her looking out the window. From the side, her lips were two red jelly beans. He could absolutely bite them. This was real life: lips like jelly beans! Historical facts! He was a man of events, not ideas, a historian, a knower, not a philosopher. ‘We’ll be there soon,’ he said.

‘When is soon?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘When you imagine soon, the word soon, what do you see in your mind? When is it?’

‘I feel like I can’t say anything without it becoming a fucking discussion anymore,’ he said.

‘Lucky we’re going to a play then,’ she said. They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.

He’d assumed she really was sick, therefore settling on a dapper exit to cheer her. ‘Promise you’ll make sure my little girl gets home safe,’ he said smarmily to the cab driver. It was a wry little joke that had always gotten a good-natured chuckle from a stranger the first time he was married.

But this time, the driver looked at him gravely. ‘I promise you, sir: I will take care of your daughter.’ Douglas tried to explain the irony – the husband, overprotective to the point of fatherliness, though of course he wasn’t actually anyone’s father – but the cab driver just kept saying, ‘Your daughter is in safe hands, sir.’ Later, when he came home, she pretended to be asleep, and the next day he couldn’t make her admit her own pretense. Another time, they visited Ramona, and it was all a very nice afternoon until she began crying on the way back. He asked why she was crying. ‘Because you don’t know what I mean even when I mean what I say,’ she said.

For a long time, Douglas had wished that he was the sort of man who could derive pleasure from the thought that Miranda was now with an ugly man. He could tell people that he used to be married to Miranda Shelby, the Wittgenstein scholar, and now she was with an ugly man. But the truth was, he didn’t even understand what she meant by with her. He only knew what it meant to be without. And to be without her was to see her always, as if the very symbols of his misery had married themselves to the designs of life. It was for the world never to answer his pleas.

But should he see Miranda now, he would know finally what to say. If a man becomes better too late, he’d ask, was he worse than if he never got better at all?