[...] On the right breast of his dashiki was a large food or drink spot. My reaction was weirdly strong: I was ashamed! I was guilty of letting him come to appear at a function wearing dirty clothes. Of course I had been lying with a cloth over my eyes when he left, but still. Then I was doubly ashamed, the second wave being over the extent of my identifying with Nelson. I had long ago seen the archetype of pathetic identification and sworn to learn something from it at the time. It had been in a crowded coffee shop in a Greyhound terminal in Yreka in the redwoods in northern California. I was sharing a table with a young local working-class couple. They had ordered omelets or scrambled eggs cooked so incompetently they looked like omelets. The husband must have been ravenous, because he managed somehow to furl an egg mass the size of a potholder onto his fork and swing the entire thing into his mouth. Obviously my horror showed. His wife turned red at my shock. Then she furled her own egg up defiantly and neatly in exactly the same way as her husband, intending, I’m certain, to suggest to me that this was merely a regional way to eat eggs and not something boorish and particular to him. She had done it instinctually. What this is is servility. I told myself Never forget it. And there I was, flushed, wanting to go up and somehow block people from seeing the spot on Nelson’s shirt.

He was back beside me when I got up the next morning. I made oatmeal and thought my kitchenizing would rouse him, but it didn’t. I ate alone, looking at him, wishing I had power, some kind of power.

I sat fixatedly staring at him. I moved my footstool around and stared from different distances, getting into it, getting into not washing, sitting there in my yakuta, not getting dressed, feeling aggrieved. How could I believe he was truly asleep? I knew his habits, his sleeping modes especially, since my insomnia gave me such amplitude to study them. I deserved to be talked to about yesterday. If my intervention was stupid I deserved to be comforted. I needed to be kept from succumbing to a certain metaphor for marriage I was recurring to too often, that is, of marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.

[...] And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.

Meanwhile the issue of the night men was turning crescive without my noticing.

I don’t know if this was deliberate protean behavior à la cornered jackrabbits or if it was simply adventitious.

Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.

Something momentous. I think so.

It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.

We sat in silence.

I hated life.

At first the jackals ignored him, but then two of them came straying over. He had the conviction that terror, his terror, would doom him and that the first thing he would have to do was make himself into a nonreacting entity: that is, stop thinking and make himself as much like the ground or the trees as he could. He had to stop sending out waves of fear and supplication. It was a process of deidentification, he called it. It soothed him to have this task.

He found it hard to talk about how he got into this deidentified condition. It was a formula, a certain order of images he made himself experience. It was an inner contortion. It had to do with making himself not feel the passage of time. In any case the jackals left him alone.

I knew he wasn’t normal in at least one respect because of an unconscionable thing I’d done the night before. I’d gotten into bed naked and we’d begun embracing, all in silence — which was atypical. And I’d discovered what I wanted to discover, that the same things made him sincere as always. But then I’d stopped and moved away to my side of the bed. I moved away gradually enough for him to protest. But he let me slip away without any semblance of pursuit whatsoever. This was accommodation gone mad, at least in terms of our protocols. This was the man I’d learned the phrase A standing prick has no conscience from. Why had I done it, when I was fifty percent certain the outcome might be what it had been? It was plucking at an old generic fear of mine about marriage in general, maybe my most fundamental fear. What happens in a marriage if your husband is no longer sexually compelled by you? What happens in your heart when you sense he’s pretending to want to do it? How old are you when this happens? The whole thing is unbearable.

I recognized what Bronwen was immediately. She was my satanic miracle. I knew it. Her image seemed to leave a print on my sight when I looked away from her. She was reading Nelson’s book with ferocious concentration. I could tell she was believing it.

Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.