The shame of words. Of lies. Wastelands of unspoken truths. Sleeping. Waking. The pallor of her fingertips. The white tips of her teeth. The sight of her naked body, so fragile, chaste, and pitiable, in a cold shower on a summer day. The taste of her silence. Of his. The permanently dead space between his and hers. Her duplicitous, hollow beauty. Her feigned tenderness that mustn’t be touched even when you felt most like touching. The rub of her small hard breasts against the skin of his face, the muscles of his belly, the hair of his chest. The patient, bitter beating against her, the more and more desperate search everywhere for some opening, with kisses, with caresses, with cajolery, with silence, with cruelty, in the darkness, in the half-light, in the hot light, on sultry afternoons, in the hours before dawn, in bed, in woods, in cars, in sand dunes, like a father, like a child, like a savage, like an ape, gently, despairingly, jokingly, pleadingly, obscenely, violently, servilely—all in vain.

The breath that whooshed out of his lungs like a sob each time that he came so loathsomely far from her and from himself and from any love, always stymied in the end by the same dead frozen silence on the same dead frozen lips. Her body as stiff as a corpse. The rustle of the sheets cold and venomous and between them the soft sibilance of thrashed silk. The fruitless movement of her lips in the hair of his chest, the vain meander of her tongue down to his groin, his hands with sudden fury grasping, shaking her shoulders, shaking her back, her whole body, as if it were a watch that had stopped ticking, even cuffing her face with the back of his hand, one time even with his fist. All in vain. Always the same creeping wanting, the same fear, the same regret, the same ruses, the same shame, the same suffocating venom welling up inside him like a scream being screamed underwater. And afterwards his questions. Her silence. Her questioning. His silence.

And, always and without fail, her insane baths and ablutions, as if she were scrubbing some filth or poison from her skin, extirpating the last of his and her body odor with hot water and suds, before getting back into bed suffused with the fragrance of the childish almond soap that he hated, all pink and clean like a baby, like a God’s angel in a kitschy religious tableau. And falling asleep right away while he lay there listening to another woman’s laughter through the wall or the whispers of couples on the lawns, drifting through the open windows on summer nights.