In Corsica, our crazy-handsome driver, like a movie star, who had lived in Brooklyn for a while but then returned to his native Corsica so his son could be raised in that culture. Me in the back seat staring out at the dense maquis. When I ask him what about the culture, he explains it simply, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

Vendettas.

Back from Arizona, a whole cache of her Kleenexes in a room I don’t normally go into. There’s a bed in there. I can’t change any more linens, I can’t clean up after her, or them. Why does she blow her nose so much? Why did she leave her underwear behind? Not really even underwear but something made only to be taken off and left in the sheets, a scrap of pale blue, discovered later, stuck to the side of the washer like a starfish. Me in my unpleasant skinniness trying to look fatter. I’ve lost a pound for every year we were together. Fell right off, almost gracefully, like stepping out of a dress. P.R. in our bedroom, stepping out of her dress. Blowing her nose. Blowing her nose. And for some fucking reason: blowing her nose.

I can’t stand listening to the beating of my own heart anymore, the sound of aloneness. Not that everyone isn’t, but most people don’t have to be as aware of it. Though there are some, like David and a couple of other people, whom I connect to wholly through that silent idea, of existential solitude. David and I only have to look at each other to acknowledge it. In his office on our campus, where I am a civilian because of an ill-timed sabbatical, choking down a hard-boiled egg while he gazes at me, looking more like Dan Fogelberg than I can even tease him about. I can’t stop feeling like I’m going to come unhitched from whatever tether is holding me here and just drift out his window and into the Westchester sky. What a terrible thought, to come unstuck from the world in Westchester, which already feels like limbo or purgatory. Driving up and down those roads, lost, in the days before GPS and cell phones, and then now, in the days when I know that all those roads are P.R.’s neighborhood. Sadly, no one wants to hear me blame P.R.—first of all, she should be as irrelevant to me as I am to her, and second of all, I’m not listening to what anyone says. She came into my house and blew her nose and his, so to speak, in at least two of our bedrooms. I insist on claiming bitching rights on anyone who does that.

So David, with his kind eyes, in his office, looking like Jackson Browne because Dan Fogelberg is dead, patiently making me take bites of egg, suggesting that I go away for a while, do my writing the way I’d planned, hugging me as a graduate student waits.