WE HAVE BEEN AWHIRL in the world. I had forgotten—we both had—how absorbing of ills it is to be there—and that the world can be entered by intent.

Rupert bought us tickets to four plays, two off-Broadway and two on—one the kind of musical we are snobs about, on which we never splurge. How awesome it is that all over the city these convocations spring up, each one only for a night—as if the very seats hold spores of audience.

‘No other audience is the same,’ Rupert said, at the first theater. ‘So dearly bought—for some. So much a birthright—for others. People who see language. Who must have mimicry.’ And I know he is thinking, as he arches his white head and the neck tendons tighten: People who may still read me.

Perhaps somebody saw us—that old couple too stiffly in their Sunday best. For, as if by some sympathetic twitch in the tough city scheme, our phone began to ring. I was asked to testify at our community board on the merits of two projected high-rises in our area, and did well, the meeting being covered on TV. Within the month, two articles mentioned Rupert’s work.

‘“Seminal,”’ I said, ‘what does that mean?’

‘“Not in the swim,”’ he said, before he thought, and then caught my hands, so that I lost the rhythm of the herbs I was putting into the potato salad. I always set them out on either side of the salad bowl, and if I leave it to habit and to my hands to alternate, I’m okay. I ruined the brisket. Don’t focus is now the order of the day.

‘It means I still have sperm,’ he said, jaunty.

‘That can ruin salads!’

What has come over me? I have always tended his physicality, his cockscomb sense of it, with a tact that came from my own delight in it.

A cowlick on a white-haired man is such a sunny sight. Now did it droop? Do I want it to?

He took the bowl from me: Actually he is a better salad-maker than me. ‘Maybe you don’t want a lover anymore, Gemma. It’s occurred to me.’

I don’t know. Maybe I don’t?

‘Or not in the kitchen.’ His smile is sad. It’s an old joke between us, that kitchens make him randy.

I cling to him, but only in love. ‘It’s rage. Where does it come from?’

His arms tighten. I suspect he knows. But won’t say.

What I want us to say to each other, want us never to say to each other, crawls behind my temples like an investigating worm.

You’re old.

You’re old.