The boundaries of my skin grow thin as I kneel there squinting my eyes shut. For a nanosecond, I am lucent.

I type it with a jeweler's lapidary care

Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past. But the spiritual lens--even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day's actions--is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like someody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.

Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk's cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his less than bright local bed partners in meetings as the Bibo Brigade, David must've seen me--a single mom in academia--as some final doorway toward a cleaned-up act.

He'd looked like an old friend when he'd first rolled in that summer with a pal. Both were shopping for a cheap place to hole up while finishing freelance writing projects they'd taken advances for. (A prodigy like David did Harvard philosophy as a mere detour.) Over cheap Chinese, we all sat for hours reordering green tea and bowls of deep-fried whatnot till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top.

Back in Boston, we'd always talked books--nobody had read more than David. When I'd whined in early meetings about not writing, from across the room, he'd shoot a conspiratorial grimace. He edited Joan's dissertation before it was published, and a year later, he and I even swapped and slashed up each other's first, sober work. But he'd seemed like a stray and forlorn undergrad on Easter when Warren and I had invited him over.

In Syracuse, I must bat my eyes at him or fluff my hair like some cartoon seductress [...], for right after, David starts packing my mailbox with bulging envelopes. Logorrheic, he calls himself. Words just pour from his pen. His yards-long letters come hand-printed in weensy, meticulous mouse type, painstakingly footnoted. Soon he's pleading hs troth, signing his missives Young Wether (after a tragic swain in book and opera with a crush on an older woman).

David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep--in a heart with a banner. Even before we've kissed on the lips, he does this. Watching those flesh-colored band-aids peel off in a phalanx to show an arm scarred and bloodied, a thinking woman would've hied for the hills. My response is more pitiful. I think, Wow, he might really like me--a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster. I plant a big wet Texas mouth on his.

[...]

For a week or so, its bliss. Any night I don't have Dev, David and I smoke cigars in my tree fort or read Russian short stories aloud till dawn. We watch movies where stuff blows up exclusively. Within the month, he phones Mother to announce, Mrs. Karr, I plan to marry your daughter. Mother's heartless comeback: Didn't you just get out of some place?

Then one day, almost like a switch is thrown in us both, reality sets in, turning the whole deal inside out. I'm raking leaves, waiting to borrow David's car for after-school pickup, but he slides alongside the curb, rolls down his window, and announces he's going to the gym instead.

Can't I drop you off at the gym and then get Dev? I want to know.

David prefers to pick up Dev himself, then work out.

But I'm trying to shelter Dev from David's presence in my life, which David resents. He wants to plug into the husband slot right away. Words get sharp. I throw down the rake and stalk inside. He follows.

The ensuing fight rocks the rafters--a worse tussle than Warren and I ever dragged through. And soon our every day is a rage, the whole romantic endeavor flip-flopping from cuss fight to smoochy-face makeup--the reversals coming too fast to get down in a diary. When Dev's home, I won't let David sleep over, which pisses him off no end, as does my leaving early from a research trip he takes me on. I'm mad he doesn't fit into the slot marked reliable.

[...]

Not that anything I utter warrants his pitching my coffee table at me, my sole piece of intact furniture splintering on the wall. After, I ring a lawyer girlfriend to send him a bill for it. He fires off a check with a note arguing that since he's paid for the table, isn't it his? I shoot back that the table's still mine, but he will own its brokenness for perpetuity.

(Years later, we'll accept each other's longhand apologies for the whole debacle and resume the correspondence that held the better angels of our natures.)

For all the schisms in my upbringing, the most savage scars didn't come from pain. Pain has belief in it. Pain is required, Patti likes to say; suffering is optional. What used to hurt was the vast and wondering doubt that could spread inside me like a desert, the niggling suspicion that none of the hard parts even happened. So the characters that so vividly inhabited me were phantasms, any residual hurt my own warped concoction.

Remember back when I was in school, I finally say into the putty-colored receiver, how you bought all those lunches and theater tickets for me, when I asked how I'd ever pay you back? Remember what you said?

He's too breathless to respond.

You said, It's not that linear. You're gonna go on to help somebody else. Well, I got a chance to help my assistant out of a pinch. And she asked how she'd pay me back, and I told her the story. I'd never have done that without you.

He's struggling to say something, barely audible his voice is, a plume of air, the smoke trail a voice leaves behind. He says, Tell her to thank me.

Houses sagged and listed on their brick stilts

And she says, I don't know why I'm still here.