“I don’t know what I felt.”

“I wrote nice things about you, too, didn’t I? Many, many more nice things than not nice? If you look at it objectively? Which I know you can’t, but still, anybody else except you could see the nice things. That you’ve been kinder to me than I ever thought I deserved to have someone be. That you’re the most excellent person I’ve ever met. That you and Joey and Jessie are my whole life. That it was only one small bad part of me that ever looked anywhere else, for a little while, at a really bad point in my life.”

“You’re right,” he cawed. “I did somehow overlook all that.”

“It’s there, Walter! Maybe when you think about it, later, you’ll remember that it’s there.”

“I’m not intending to do much thinking about it.”

“Not now, but later. Even if you still don’t want to talk to me, maybe you’ll at least forgive me a little bit.”

The light in the windows dimmed suddenly, a spring cloud passing by. “You did the worst thing you could possibly do to me,” he said. “The worst thing, and you knew very well it was the worst thing, and you did it anyway. Which part of that am I going to want to think back on?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, weeping afresh. “I’m so sorry you can’t see it the way I see it. I’m so sorry this happened.”

“It didn’t ‘happen.’ You did it. You fucked the kind of evil shit who would leave this on my desk for me to read.”

“For God’s sake, though, Walter, it was just sex.”

“You let him read things about me you never would have let me read.”

“Just stupid sex four years ago. What’s that compared to our whole life?”

“Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t want to shout at you. Not with Jessica in the house. But you have to help me with that and not be dis ingenuous about what you did, or I’m going to shout your fucking head off.”

“I’m not being disingenuous.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’m not going to shout at you. I’m going to leave this room, and I don’t want to see you after that. And we have a bit of a problem, because I actually have to work in this house, so it’s not very easy for me to move out.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I know I have to go. I’ll wait until Jessie’s gone, and then I’ll get out of your sight. I totally understand how you’re feeling. But I have to tell you one thing before I go, just so you know. I want to make sure you know that it’s like being stabbed in the heart for me to leave you with your assistant. It’s like having the skin ripped off my breasts. I can’t stand it, Walter.” She looked at him imploringly. “I’m so hurt and jealous, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“Maybe. Some year. A little bit. But do you see what it means that I’m feeling it now? Do you see what it means about who I love? Do you see what’s really going on here?”

The sight of her wild, pleading eyes became, at that moment, so crestingly painful and disgusting to him-produced such a paroxysm of cumulative revulsion at the pain they’d caused each other in their marriage-that he began to shout in spite of himself: “Who drove me to it? Who was I never quite good enough for? Who always needed more time to think it over? Don’t you think twenty-six years is long enough to think it over? How much fucking more time do you need? Do you think there’s anything in your writing that surprised me? Do you think I didn’t know every fucking bit of it every fucking minute of the way? And love you anyway, because I couldn’t help it? And waste my entire life?”

“That’s not fair, oh, that’s not fair.”

“Fuck fairness! And fuck you!”

He kicked the manuscript into a white flurry, but he was disciplined enough not to slam the door behind him as he left. Downstairs in the kitchen, Jessica was toasting herself a bagel, her overnight bag standing by the table. “Where is everybody this morning?”

“Mom and I had a little bit of a fight.”

“Sounded like it,” Jessica said with the ironic eye-widening that was her customary response to belonging to a family less even-keeled than she. “Is everything OK now?”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“I was hoping to get the noon train, but I can take a later one if you want.”

Because he’d always been close to Jessica and felt he could count on her support, it didn’t occur to him that he was making a tactical error in brushing her off now and sending her on her way. He didn’t see how crucial it was to be the first to give the news to her and frame the story properly: didn’t imagine how quickly Patty, with her game-winning instincts, would move to consolidate her alliance with their daughter and fill her ears with her version of the story (Dad Dumps Mom on Flimsy Pretext, Takes Up with Young Assistant). He wasn’t thinking of anything beyond the moment, and his head was aswirl with precisely the kind of feelings that had nothing to do with fatherhood. He gave Jessica a hug and thanked her profusely for coming down to help launch Free Space, and then he went into his office to stare out the windows. The state of emergency had waned enough for him to remember all the work he needed to be doing, but not nearly enough for him to do it. He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour: the trade was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Some otherworldly amount of time later, after he’d heard the rolling of a large suitcase and the clunk of the front door, Lalitha came tapping on his office door and stuck her head in. “Everything OK?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Come sit on my lap.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Now?”

“Yes, now. When else? My wife’s gone, right?”

“She left with a suitcase, yes.”

“Well, she’s not coming back. So come on. Why not. There’s nobody else in the house.”

And she did. She was not a hesitant person, Lalitha. But the executive chair was ill suited for lap-sitting; she had to hang on to his neck to stay aboard, and even then the chair rocked hazardously. “This is what you want?” she said.

“Actually, no. I don’t want to be in this office.”

“I agree.”

He had so much to think about, he knew he would be thinking uninterruptedly for weeks if he let himself start now. The only way not to think was to plunge forward. Up in Lalitha’s slope-ceilinged little room, the onetime maid’s quarters, which he hadn’t visited since she’d moved in, and whose floor was an obstacle course of clean clothes in stacks and dirty ones in piles, he pressed her against the side wall of the dormer and gave himself blindly to the one person who wanted him without qualification. It was another state of emergency, it was no hour of no day, it was desperate. He lifted her onto his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation.

“One of us has to leave at six to pick up Eduardo at the airport,” he said. “Just want to note that.”

“What time is it now?”

He turned her very dusty alarm clock to check. “Two-seventeen,” he marveled. It was the strangest time he’d seen in his entire life.

“I apologize that the room is so messy,” Lalitha said.

“I like it. I love how you are. Are you hungry? I’m a little hungry.”

“No, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m not hungry. But I can get you something.”

“I was thinking, like, a glass of soy milk. Soy beverage.”