They try. He tears up the pregnant photos. Doesn’t want to throw away all the pieces — sees himself tucking away two or three in some corner pocket of his wallet — but feels he has to. Also the poems and most of the letters. Two, and innocent ones, he puts in a file folder marked “keepsakes for the kids”—she’s talking about taking her summer vacation in one of them, her grandmother’s illness in the other and what it was like visiting her in a nursing home the first time. Goes to a therapist with Amby and to the same one alone and at each session says he’s thinking less and less of Denise, more of her, feels their recent efforts at saving the marriage are working, but not much of that’s true. Though it will be, he thinks, and for now she feels a lot better toward him. They have sex more often than they’ve had in a year, but it mostly doesn’t work for him. When it does he’s usually only hard for a short time and only twice did it end up for him in even a little thrill. She says a couple of times “Don’t worry, you’ll be the same bellowing bear as always, down on me, under me, in me, all around me, if just a bit less of that perhaps, modifications for age factors and all, but certainly this more than anything takes time. The essential thing is we both feel infinitely better about each other, true?” “Without question.” He still has a tough time holding her hand or putting his arms around her or pressing up close to her, except in bed, and there mostly to keep warm. He kisses her without feeling but seems to do a good job not showing it, the way she kisses back. Maybe she’s thinking of someone else or is kissing him like that to goad him on. If so, hasn’t worked. Sometimes she whispers in his ear, something she never did before like this, “Go, bear, go, bear, do it, any way you like.” He usually apologizes after, says he wishes it was better for her no matter what it is for him, and she says once “No real problem; I’m getting a few kicks out of it.” He starts sneaking looks at Denise’s photos in the kids’ keepsake folder. Some with the girls, others of just her, one of her in a bathing suit when they were on a beach building a sand whale with Olivia. It’s the only one where even a little of her bare legs and a lot of her bare arms show and more of the top of one breast than in any other photo, but she’s mostly hidden behind their beach equipment. He stares at the photo sometimes, trying to imagine from the way the breast’s shaped in the suit and on top what it would look like uncovered. In a book of hers — the variorum edition of Yeats’s poems that had been her first husband’s — a photo drops out when he’s reading it of Denise and Eva in a bath. Eva’s first bath in a real tub, he remembers. Denise yelled from the bathroom “Howard, come quick with the camera — we have to catch this; she’s an absolute scream. She wants to swim first time in and I think she’s almost doing it.” The print’s not a good one and he can just about make out, because she’s helping Eva stand in the tub, which body’s which. He gets out the two letters and reads them almost every day, trying to find something in them he might have missed. A sexual or amorous reference or suggestion to him or anything hidden or not initially obvious of any kind. He also starts praying again for her return, things like “Please, if it can be done, let it be done, for me, for our girls, I’ll give a finger, a hand, an arm if You want, anything to get her back in one healthy piece and if the cutting off of it doesn’t give me too much pain,” and finally in another confessional burst tells Amby all this. She says “Perhaps you should go to the therapist twice a week in addition to the once-a-week with me,” and he does for a couple of months, no change, maybe even gets worse, searches the house frantically a few times for something of Denise’s he doesn’t know is there, curses out loud to himself when he can’t find anything, tears up an entire room’s carpet because he thinks he remembers she for some reason hid something under it, digs up a plant she planted thinking maybe when she dug the hole she intentionally or inadvertently dropped something of hers in it, and then says to Amby “Look, to avoid any discomfort or whatever you want to call it — call it ‘hell’ for all I can do about it now: hell, hell, I’ve become a freako wacked-out maniaco the last few months — I think I should start sleeping in the bed in the basement and maybe even start cooking and ka-kaing and living my whole fucking horrible life there.”
She leaves with Gwynne. He sees Gwynne every Sunday, a month every summer, promises himself no more women ever. For what’s the use? He might get excited by one a few times, for weeks, a month, then it would happen again: Denise, letters, searches, praying and ranting like a madman, screwing up another woman’s life and maybe even another kid’s, confusing his other children’s lives even further. Or maybe he wouldn’t get excited by any woman but he’d try doing it with them from time to time to prove something — that he could still attract them, was still attracted by them — and how could he fake it now if he can hardly even get it up to do it to himself anymore? Olivia and Eva go to college, Gwynne to kindergarten. He likes living alone and getting older and gradually weaker; fewer chances; he can go crazy when he wants, so long as his daughters are away; drink till he passes out if he feels like it. He puts up photos of Denise all over the house. On walls, up against things: every photo he can find of her. Then has negatives made of his favorites and gets these made into positives and lots of them enlarged and puts them around too. He writes poems about her again, stories, one-act plays but they’re all terrible, bring back nothing to him, don’t make him cry or laugh or excited or anything and the writing stinks too, and throws them away. Does drawings and then portraits and whole-body paintings of her from memory. Several of them nude, but the only resemblance he thinks he gets is the shape and color of her vulva pubic hair. He puts one of the nudes on the floor, jerks off to it, when he’s about to come he falls flat on the canvas but miscalculates where he is on it and does it on her belly. Then he thinks this is disgusting, he’s gone from bad to almost hopeless, not only seeming nuts and becoming a dumb drunk and slob but doing something sickening and sick to her memory, and jumps on the painting, kicks a hole in it, rips it and all the other canvases off their stretchers, dumps the drawings and canvases and burns the brushes and stretchers. What now? No art form left to express himself about her. Music, but he can’t read a note and his extemporaneous piano playing is just banging. Singing, but his voice is flat. Dance, and he takes off his shoes and runs across the room in a dancing motion, eyes closed, arms out as if he’s going to embrace someone, and slams into a chair.