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