“Couples fight, Nick, and then they work it out.”

“Do they push each other around like you did this morning?” The bitterness was back.

“You were crowding me, I pushed you away without thinking. I’m so sorry. It will never, ever happen again.”

“I’m tired of fighting with you,” Nick said, and Bill heard the despair. “Maybe we should—”

“Don’t leave me.” Bill blurted out. “I’d die without you.”

The despairing voice replied, “Oh, Bill.”

“Come home. I promise it’ll be different.”

“My mom’s putting dinner on the table,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Nick, please come home.”

He sighed. “I’ll come home in the morning. Goodnight, Bill.”

Two drinks later, Bill changed from his suit into Levi’s and a black T-shirt. A drink after that, he had made up his mind. He went out and drove to a private sex south of Market. He entered an unmarked door, checked his clothes, snorted a line of coke in the bathroom that a stranger offered him. Then he wandered into back room, where, in an old claw foot bathtub, he lay naked as men came over and soaked him with streams of beer-scented piss or shoved their cocks into his mouth and poured come down his throat. In his scrambled mind, he thought, if Nick could see him now, he’d know how sorry Bill was for hurting him.

But the next time their fight turned physical, he gave Nick a black eye. Nick hit back and they ended up grappling on the kitchen floor, swinging and grabbing, both of them with tears in their eyes. Nick went limp beneath him. Bill sat back on his haunches. The fight was about their diminishing sex life. Nick had told him he was sick of Bill coming to bed smelling like a bar and blaming his limp dick on too much to drink. That’s when Bill hit him. Now, he released Nick, stood up, went to the sink and washed his face, drying it on a kitchen towel. He heard Nick pull himself off the floor and pick up the chair they had kicked over.

“Are you leaving?” Bill asked in a flat voice.

“You want me to leave?”

He turned around. Nick’s eye was already bruising. “Your eye.”

Nick touched it gingerly and flinched.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know what I want anymore. I’m so tired.”

Nick said, “I’m going to bed.” He paused at the doorway, looked at Bill and asked, “What happened to us?”

Bill would think about that question for weeks after the fight but he could never come up with a different answer than the one he gave Nick that night.

“I don’t know. Maybe love is not enough.”

And Nick said, “You call this love?”