Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to [...] Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they'll try--without letup--to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you've sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads', preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. Andre triple-creme cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.

It's taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I've heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.

[...] I want to believe I'm at home with these composed individuals. They're liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. [...]

[...] As he's locking up, he says--color blazing high on his flared cheekbones--And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy?

To make us appear even more fractious

Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it's all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can't recount one damn thing we did.

I thought you wanted that party we're having, he says, with your sister coming for a week.

This party--our first--was long negotiated. He's noting the traffic to and from the airport, the hours of writing he'll lose. Should I offer to cancel the party in order to be picked up? When he hangs up, I feel confident that I'll see him at the gate.

Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle.

I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

[...] I tell the husband I've got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be. Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I'm playing to justify the fact that I'd rather drink than love.