SO WE’VE QUARRELED. BECAUSE I wouldn’t say why. Or couldn’t.

‘Why should we stop?’ he says. ‘Or give up—anything? Why be so doctrinaire?’

That’s a word he always uses in argument.

‘All that word means is—argument,’ I say.

‘So it does.’ He smiles, just a bit superior—as he always is with me—on words.

‘No. What it means here is—we’re arguing.’

‘A word does change in context,’ he says, delighted with himself. As Heidegger would agree. No—excuse me.’ For a minute he looks lost. ‘I meant—Wittgenstein.’

‘I’ll excuse you.’ I haven’t used sarcasm on him—since when?

‘Both the same period of thought, you see,’ he says. But his forehead is pink.

‘I see—and I don’t see,’ I say. ‘I merely hang the pictures in this house.’ It is true that he can’t hang one properly. Never could.

‘True,’ he says. ‘You’re the builder. Or used to be.’

‘True. You always had to encourage me.’ But ought he to say? ‘Throw that in my face.’

‘You never encourage me—’ he says.

‘To write? No use.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Throw that in my face. But then—why cut me off—when I do?’

Is that why he was doing the almanac? ‘But that’s not you writing,’ I say. ‘That’s us.’

He is silent for a while. Then he says, in that diagnostic voice of his which always flicks me: ‘Is it, Gemma? Is it really?’

‘True—’ I say after a while. ‘No, I was doing it for me. That—record. And so were you. Doing it for you.’

‘True—’ he almost yells. ‘And what’s wrong with that? Maybe you think I should do the poems in tandem too!’

‘No.’ I can’t enter there. He knows I know that. ‘But maybe poems also bleed away life.’

I said this last so low that for a minute I didn’t see the slough I’d fallen into.

Slough—that’s from my first marriage. The word on which that marriage fell. Arturo, sent for two years to a British prep school, transacted for by mail, that had turned out to be not Church of England but Wesleyan, had picked up the word there. ‘I am in the slough of Despond,’ he would say, when needing to explain his idleness: ‘The sla-ow of Despond. Spell-ed “sloof.”’ Charm, when sifted on one over the years like gold dust, can make one shriek—and I finally did, yelling how it was there he was happiest—bumming off. So I learned what that slough is for me. Or should have learned. It’s where you say what you should never think.

A minute before, Rupert and I were only what any infighting couple is. Two angry sofas shouting True, True across a square of rug. But he and I have lost the knack of light quarreling. Of casual traitordom.

We had it once. When we were young.

And what does he say in this white-haired quiet?

‘No. Poems bleed.’

Then I’m down on my knees to him. The knees are no longer that serviceable. How did I make it, to this floor? ‘I’m sorry. If we weren’t in the parlor I would never have said.’

He knows what I mean. The parlor is where a middle child, lying under a middle-sized and not too good baby grand piano, can tally the family falsities. And acquire them.

From below he seems like an Eiffel Tower, topped by a face. Slowly nearing me. ‘Oh be careful!’ I cry. Of his neck? His knees? His head? What must he be most careful of?

Then he is on the floor with me, cradling me. As I cradle him.

‘We shouted,’ he says. ‘Do you remember?’

The girls had been with us six months. We two walked on eggs, cooing like the turtledoves we must always be. We must be ideal, true, blue, never blow our cool; we wanted them. Solemn little pie-faces poking from the school bus quick into their bedrooms, we could not get to them. ‘Manners like contessas,’ Rupert growled—what had Arturo done to them?

Then one day, a rainy Saturday, the two mousegirls in their hole and we two in the parlor—the sofas blew.

‘Can you recall what we fought about?’

‘No—except that we both kept bellowing: “True!”’

And by evening—we were four.

Tea for Two, the girls confessed they had nicknamed us. ‘It’s hard when your parents are lovers,’ Christina said, surprising us at her age. And Frankie said to me, her mother—‘It’s easier with nonno. To be against.’ Turning my heart black with congested love.

Rupert is watching me. He knows where the thoughts go. ‘Look at us, on the floor,’ he says too gaily. ‘Hope nobody comes in.’

Look at him, biting his lip. He knows what he’s said. Shall I answer him? Yes, I must.

‘Oh Rupert,’ I say. ‘Nobody will.’

Then it’s on us, that fear we never had before. To be in the blind city, under the blank stair—in an empty house.

‘Nonsense—’ I hear him say, faraway at my ear. ‘We’re on the floor. It must be that we’re young.’

‘Not unless we can get up from it.’

Using each other like handgrips, we manage it.

‘Shall it be the kitchen, then?’ he says. ‘Or the bedroom?’

‘I don’t care which. If only this love will stop.’

What’s got into me? I am saying everything.

‘It’s only—that I’m—too weak for it,’ I say.

He’s pale. ‘So am I.’

But it helps to say. We are no longer shivering.

‘Have we had supper?’ he says.

I can’t recall. The kitchen will tell us, though.

It doesn’t. We may have cleaned up.

‘Soup on a tray, then,’ I say. ‘That can’t go wrong. Never has. And the avocado I was saving for Quinn.’

‘Soup on a tray—’ you echo. ‘Better than laurels. And Quinn can’t have everything.’

‘And a hot bath.’

‘And a hot bath.’