He’s a pond into which things drop, vanish. He hates when she calls him the absentminded professor, sensing a prick in it. Do all Ivy League academics possess reverent, pragmatic spouses who manage the boring earthly acts of clothing and cleaning and child-rearing and pleasing that they might occupy themselves in probing knowledge? Bright souls can’t wash a dish! His oblivion is self-serving, chosen, though bred into him as well. As a teenager, he was thought too rare and gifted to waste time on a Saturday job. What is it to only ever have been a pupil and a teacher, never to have served or had a boss? How on earth did she miss how delicate he was? He hid it well. He seeks, she thinks without awareness, to make an angel of her, an angel like his mother. I’m not your fucking angel, she wants to say. Don’t you see that it has taken more to get me here than it took for you to get where you are? She cannot fit the emotion into words, doesn’t yet know how. She loves him. He’s the closest she has found. Is this the cost? Ah, she thinks too much. She must strive for softness. Other women, her friends, seem happier, more forgiving — perhaps one because the other. He behaves like this when she’s pigheaded. He’s tender otherwise.

At home, he ascends to the spare room. There he will spend the night alone. In the morning, he’ll let her curl her body around him.