“No. She’d already had three abortions. I’d stopped talking about having children after the last one, a year and a half before. I’d seen Levitt on Monday. When I told him I was having terminal marital problems, he was stunned. She hadn’t simply told him that we were planning to have children. She’d spent an hour elaborating on it, telling him how much in love we were, more in love than ever. She knew we were in terrible shape with each other when she spoke to him. I thought about it a long time afterward. She had no need to say anything at all to him, of course, but that was the one thing she could say that left her in a favorable light with him … no matter which way our marriage went. That was later. On that last trip to Jamaica Estates, it was still sinking in. She didn’t know what Levitt had told me. I wasn’t going to tell her, either. I started Thursday sleepless, hung over and with her latest whopper very much on my mind. Having a hangover means you’re still drunk, just on the downside, with your motor functions and judgement still impaired. I decided I was going to stay in the room all day. Maryellen was beside herself. I’d never shown any of our real life to her parents. ‘Tell them I’m sick,’ I said. ‘Tell them anything you want.’ I was in that frame of mind, still drinking, thinking I was pacing myself, telling myself that I was right next to being sober. She came up once, in the morning. ‘As far as they’re concerned downstairs, I’m looking in on you, the way a good wife should,’ she said. ‘What I really want to know is how long you intend to maintain this reign of terror.’”

Levine chuckled. “Maybe you were still drunk, but at least you weren’t pussywhipped anymore.”

“There was more to my behavior in those years than that,” Devlin said. They were approaching Sunnyside. “Living with a drunk is never a day at the beach.”

“You live near here, don’t you?”

“Three blocks south of the boulevard.”

“Tell me where to turn. I want to drive by and see if anything is happening. You can keep talking.”

“I don’t want to get picked up.”

“You won’t, I told you. What’s the matter, you don’t believe a cop?”

“Cops are pricks,” Devlin said. “Ask them. I decided at three o’clock to go downstairs, which meant that I got there at four-thirty. I thought I was sober, but I was stiff, my eyelids at half-mast, my gait a cross between John Wayne’s and Robert Mitchum’s, or maybe both at the same time.” He’d gone straight to the bar, he remembered. “Joe was out, Maryellen elsewhere in the house, and everybody else was dead quiet. I didn’t get the idea.”