He'd have pigment on his shoes, and there'd be blue footprints on the carpet.

He'd kick those shoes off under the coffee table and leave them there.

Dirty handprints on a shirt, a curtain, the armrests of his chair.

A tie hanging on a doorknob or the headboard to our bed.

A greasy highball glass on the corner of the nightstand.

His very touch was like cancer. He'd take a good thing – organization, cleanliness, perfection – and subvert it, diminish it, dirty it up and dry it out.

Our intimate life was no different. He'd lie atop me, grunting and thrusting. Always with that grotesque slapping of skin, like the sound of a chorus of frogs or toads forever applauding.

His hands were always so sweaty. His hair, too, by the end of it. I felt drowned in the stuff. He ate submarine sandwiches during the day. Oil, vinegar, onion, garlic. It came out in his sweat; wherever he touched me, he left that odor behind. I felt greasy. Pawed. Molested.

Walter was a clumsy ape.

Three years into our marriage, Walter wanted to have children. He told me so right after dinner. We never ate together; it was always him at the coffee table and me in the other room, at the breakfast nook, waiting for him to be done so I could go try to clean up his messes before they left a permanent mark.

That night I'd made rigatoni in pink sauce, a vodka sauce. I remember this as plain as day. One of the noodles had jumped the edge of his plate – he was always so sloppy with his eating – and sat there on the carpet. It was like a worm, burrowing in. The melted Parmesan cheese had already stuck to the fibers. The pink sauce had already soaked in. I thought, I'll need to steamclean the whole carpet. Again.

That's when he said it.

He stood up, put his hand on the small of my back as I bent over to pick up the fallen noodle, and said it so matter-of-factly.

"Let's have kids."

Three words. Each word a clump of dirt. Each a dirty noodle on the carpet.

I stood up and I had my first moment of rebellion.

I said, "We'll have children when you stop acting like a dirty little baby."

Walter had a chance there. He could have saved himself. He could have said something nice or just said nothing.

But he opened his mouth and said, "You watch your goddamn mouth."

And he did this… thing. He grabbed my wrist – the wrist that led to the hand that still held that stupid rigatoni noodle – and he gripped my wrist tight, so tight it hurt. He meant for it to hurt. I saw it in his eyes.

I pulled my hand free.

"That settles that," he said.

Then I walked into the kitchen.

I went to the blender. It was old, an Oster two-speed with the beehive base and the heavy glass pitcher.