rises and goes to where she is standing, her hands resting on the edge of the sink. He wraps his arms around her slender waist and smells the beginnings of her tears—a sweet, phosphorescent odor, like melting beeswax.
“It’s stupid, I know.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid at all. Why is it stupid?”
“I feel like someone in a play,” she says. “You know, the mother? That old bitch, can’t let go, nobody’s good enough for her boy.”
“And you’re right. Nobody is. And you’re not like that at all.”
A heavy sigh. Still, Arthur holds on.
“She’s just somebody he met in class. We’ve been through this—how many times?”
“They’re probably sleeping together.”
Arthur nods. “Probably.”
“God, listen to me.” She shakes her head and resumes cleaning the pot. “You probably think it’s just great.”
Arthur doesn’t answer. The cat comes nosing into the kitchen and coils first around Arthur’s feet and then around Miriam’s, asking to be let out.
“That goddamned cat,” Arthur says. He kisses Miriam’s neck, still warm with sleep and the sheets of their bed. “You know, I had the strangest dream,” he says suddenly.
Still facing away, Miriam tips her head against his. “I think I did too. So. Tell me about yours.”
Arthur lets his eyes fall closed; in this interior darkness, his wife’s body pressed against his, her hips and his hips meeting—always the old rhythm implied, the metronome of marriage—he imagines he is asleep and tries to return to his dream, following it down a long hallway, a trick he has used before.
“I’m not sure,” he says after a moment. “I’ve already forgotten.”
“Was it a bad dream?” She is stroking his hair. “I heard you muttering.”
“I don’t know.” Arthur draws air into his chest. “Some of it.”
“What else?”
Arthur thinks. It is her voice he is following now; below him, without warning, he suddenly feels the tug of blackness, a yawning chasm as vast as a stadium. And something else: the smell of baking bread. He has never had a dream like this before, of this he is certain. The memory of it makes him feel strangely happy. He opens his eyes.
“I think you were in it.” He shrugs at nothing; already the information is gone, as is his memory that she, too, has dreamt, and meant to tell him what. “I think you saved me from something, as usual. So it was a good dream.”
She turns to face him then; her eyes still moist, she kisses him quickly and smiles. Up close he sees that her face is tired, and newly thin: his fault. Regret slices through him, and then, filling its wake, a pale and luminous awe. How many times has she performed this duty? He searches her gray eyes with his own. How many times has she been awakened from a sound slumber by a distant cry and made her fumbling way down a darkened hall, to wrap herself around a son or daughter whose arms flailed at nothing, saying, No, no, there’s nothing to fear, none of it was real? He asks this, and for an instant he imagines that the children are asleep upstairs; but of course this is an illusion, a trick of time, like the pea that darts from shell to shell unseen, and so is in both places at once and also neither. No: it is morning in their kitchen, the children are grown and gone, O’Neil at college waiting for their visit, his sister, Kay—moody, mysterious Kay—married now and living her life in New Haven. The passage of years is amazing, a thing of wonder. He stands before it as, in the past, he stood outside the children’s doors, listening to Miriam deliver the comforts he could not: a glass of water, a fresh blanket, Miriam holding the child’s hand in hers to say, squeezing, See? This is real. How many times? A thousand? A thousand thousand? Count the stars in the heavens, Arthur thinks, and you will know that number.
“You’re welcome,” she tells him.
And their day begins.
Each of them has a secret. Here is Arthur’s:
His secret is a letter, which he has delayed writing until this morning, at the office where he works—a letter he will never send. It is a letter to a woman not his wife.
Dear Dora, he writes.
How did it come about? Even Arthur doesn’t know; could not say, precisely, how it is that on this morning in November he, Arthur, age fifty-six, a devoted married man for twenty-nine years, has fallen in love (is he? in love?) with Dora Auclaire. But