Olivia comes home next day and says “Amby wouldn’t mind your calling her. She said ’Your dad seemed intelligent, cultured, obviously serious at what he does, and we have some of the same interests, including you,’ meaning me, which was the one part of what she said I didn’t like. Too trying-to-please-me and maybe through me, you, something I never saw in her before. ‘So,’ she continued to say, which you can tell from my voice change, ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t spend half an hour over coffee, unless it would disturb you,’ meaning me again, which was OK this time, since she was showing she was aware of the possible conflict, she being my teacher and me so often still talking of my mother, and things.” “You do? Me too, my sweetheart.” He calls her. They have coffee after her school lets out. Olivia waves to them and then points them out to her friends as they walk down the hill to the coffee shop. Start seeing each other, marry. She wants a child. He says he doesn’t think he has the energy to help bring up another one but if she wants it, fine, all right, “Three was what we originally planned… Denise and I. Excuse me. Nothing there meant that wasn’t there, but you know what I mean.” They have a girl. He’s never really in love with Amby. She’s nice, all that, but something keeps interfering. He just doesn’t feel what he’d love to for her. It’d so simplify things. This way’s unrealistic, bordering on the crazy, can only make him unhappy, also Amby and the girls. She’s still very pretty, good figure, nothing she does or says puts him off, but he hardly even ever wants to put his arms around her or kiss her. No long deep ones when he does as he sometimes even did with… he can’t believe it, forgot her name, Susan was her daughter; Gail. Rarely gets erections. When he does they’re rarely full. A few times she’s said “What’s wrong? Something I’ve done? Anything I can do?” and he said “It’s nothing, maybe my bloodless age, I’ll see a doctor if it doesn’t get better.” They usually have to work hard before anything happens with him. He looks at Denise’s photos when she’s not around. Especially the pregnant ones, nude and clothed. Remembers how he felt then. Sex just about every day till she went to the hospital three weeks overdue. They were warned not to. Hates looking at the photos he’s in with her. Not because he looks so much younger. Hell, he was much younger, so no problem there. It’s that he was much happier then and in them. He can’t think of life without Denise. Exaggeration. Sometimes he thinks he can’t live without her. Another way. The three girls, they’re wonderful, he loves them, always wants to be with them, if something happened to one of them he doesn’t know what he’d do. Forget it. What he said about life and living without Denise expresses a lot about how he feels. He prays she’ll come back. “Dear God,” he says in his head, Amby asleep beside him, “I don’t believe in you but will in every possible way if you bring her back and in the condition she was in before she got sick plus whatever natural aging and minor-illness effects that would have taken place. I’ll make everything good for this hurt. Which will probably only have to be to Amby, but whatever you want, I will.” This is silly, he right away thinks, praying and this prayer. If there’s a God, He can see straight through it; if there isn’t, then what’s the sense? He writes poems to her, most going something like this: “My love, my dove, it’s what I feel, awfully unpoetical as these lines must be to your trained ears, but it’s tearing at my entrails and is that any better than gripping my gizzards or quickening my doom? Come back, I’m on a rack, the birds have stopped singing for me and now I don’t even see them when they pass close overhead on a clement day or beg for attention or crumbs at my feet. What do I mean? I’m a bird. I’m going cuckoo for you. Cuckoo, cuckoo, I miss and worship you, my fellow indivisible cuckoo.”
“It’s just not working,” he says to Amby one morning, she’s feeding the baby by spoon, he’s in the next room putting in toast. “What isn’t? The toaster?” “Listen, hell with this goddamn toast and eating,” and he pushes the toast up and throws it into the sink. “What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he says, coming into the living room. “Listen, I still — hours every day. No that’s a little too farfetched, but I know it’s a short to moderately long time and just about every day. Please, stop feeding her for a second. This is very important. You have to have my complete attention. I have to have yours, I of course mean, for I might not be able to say this again. I was saying ‘long’ for something like this — a long time, almost every other day, and year after year, even when you wouldn’t think I would … the general you and maybe you-Amby too — think of Denise. There we are. Denise, that’s who.” “You’re a liar or a bastard. You just want to get out,” and she drops the spoon and runs upstairs. The baby cries in her highchair. Food runs out of her mouth. He sits, wipes her, says “There, there,” finishes feeding her, takes her out for a stroll. He speaks to Amby again later. I’m sorry. Listen, just sit. I’ll try to stop thinking of her. I know we should stay together — you and I. I want to. Olivia and Eva also shouldn’t lose you as they did their mother and then Gail. And lose their baby sister too, whom I’m sure you’d want to have total custody of if we separated or divorced, weekends this and that, which wouldn’t be enough for them — would be a great loss.” “You speak of her as if she isn’t yours.” “I do? Where? Because I’m sure she is. Who else’s could she be? Meaning: sure she is. I know you haven’t had lovers. Neither have I. I’d never do that to you. Meaning, that’s not what I’d do to you. The other thing — it’s all in my head — I’m guilty. Listen, I’m a confused man; very. Denise’s death must have turned off some important lights in me. And they just don’t make, or they’re too tough to find anymore, the same kind of bulbs — but enough of that crap. I should get a new lamp though, right? Or see a lamp fixer, even if he charges ninety-five an hour per. So what? What’s money in something like this, and I’m covered. We are, and I want us to continue to be. Listen, don’t pay any attention to what I’m saying. But I loved her deeply. I told you that when we met. But I also told you it was all over, except sad moments that come back now and then. That was natural. We agreed. But she got sick. She deteriorated badly and too quickly. Bam, I looked around, she was gone. The girls and I were heartbroken for a year. They could have got out of it sooner if I hadn’t been such a mess. Well, natural, natural, guilty as I still am about that too. Though they turned out all right, are turning out all right, and what else could I have done about it much as I wanted to and tried? Most of the time tried — I milked a little of it too. But it takes a year — it took a year — I thought, but some of it obviously stayed. Obviously. I still can’t quite get her out of my clunky head. Not ‘quite’—more. I’m a schmuck, a fool, something’s still got to be wrong with me and maybe I’ve gotten progressively worse. It’s ruined all my relationships with women since. The ones I wanted to be close. We’ve talked about that. Till you came. You were supposed to be different. Your patience with me, my feelings for you. Mutual, the other way around, though not my patience. And you were. You are. There isn’t anyone like you. But that woman keeps coming back. I can’t get hard-ons? Most of the time. Fine, now you know why. I’m almost sure that’s it. And I’ve pictures. I look at them of her. Nude ones even. I used to jerk off to them, now I don’t, maybe because I no longer can. Physiological, psychological — something, or the two combined. And her old letters. Me, with my bad memory, I’ve memorized whole passages. I sit and sit and stare at them, as if I expect the script to disappear and then her hand to write the same letter again or a new message to me. One time I actually thought I saw her hand doing this. I was ecstatic, though I couldn’t read it. First the hand, then the arm, then the whole body, I said to myself then — I won’t be able to sit still when it gets to the breasts and face — when the image of the hand faded. It’s crazy, I know. The entire thing. Or very bizarre, terrible, out of kilter, but it’s something and probably much worse than I’ve said. In those adjectives. But I don’t know what to say about it to you anymore. Thanks for continuing to listen to me. I shouldn’t have married you. Neither Gail — no one but my first wife. Denise. Meaning — but you can see what I mean. I’ll see a doctor. A head one. For the head. It was unfair to marry you, was what I meant, if I had any idea I was going to act like this — and I did — or even to have started with you. Well, we got a nice baby out of it. And I still love you — that’s no lie — that’s the truth — and need and want you — all that — and certainly for you and Gwynne to stay. I think it’ll get better. Don’t ask me why I do-something just tells me all of a sudden. Maybe all I needed was this — to let it out. I almost know it will, in fact — get better — so trust me, please. I’ll get down on my knees. A Bible. Anything. Swear on my beloved mother’s head. Actually not that, since it’s too much name-in-vain business and also too much like part of an act. But whatever, if you want, to convince you I truly believe all of it will get better to the point of being vastly to completely improved. I mean by that: you and I and also my body and mind. OK, I’m done, thanks again, listening and so on, and now you.” “I don’t see it, really. Let’s say I’m skeptical, based on what you’ve said. If it’s gone on for so long and with so many women and has only gotten worse, why should I think it will get better because of one voluminous and somewhat confusing airing-out? That said, we can still try. There are the children. I don’t love you anymore, but we’ll see about that too. But enough. The baby’s waking up.”