“Late one night she told me.
We’d come home from a party
where she drank more wine
than usual, from nervousness
“I suppose. I was astonished,
which is typical,
and her lover of course
was my friend. My naïveté
“served their purposes: What
you don’t know beats your head in.
After weeping for an hour or so
I tried screaming.
“Then I quieted down;
then I broke her grandmother’s
teapot against the pantry brickwork,
which helped a bit.
“She kept apologizing
as she walked back and forth,
chainsmoking. I hated her,
and thought how beautiful
“she looked as she paced,
which started me weeping again.
Old puzzlements began to solve
themselves: the errand
“that took all afternoon;
the much-explained excursion
to stay with a college roommate
at a hunting lodge
“without a telephone;
and of course the wrong numbers.
Then my masochistic mind
printed Kodacolors
“of my friend and my wife
arranged in bed together.
When I looked out the window,
I saw the sky going
“pale with dawn; soon the children
would wake: Thinking of them
started me weeping again.
I felt exhausted, and
“I wanted to sleep neither
with her nor without her,
which made me remember:
When I was a child we knew
“a neighbor named Mr. Jaspers—
an ordinary
gray and agreeable
middle-aged businessman who
“joked with the neighborhood
children when he met us on
the street, giving us pennies,
except for once a year
“when he got insanely drunk
and the police took him.
One time he beat his year-old
daughter with a broomstick,
“breaking a rib bone, and as
she screamed she kept crawling
back to her father: Where else
should she look for comfort?”