I don’t really plan to get married; Ruth and I start living together, in an old white Spanish-style apartment building in a beat-up neighborhood between school and downtown, across the street from a mortuary where bats fly out of the eaves every night and circle above the street lamps and the blooming oleanders. She’s a graduate student, a poet who composes her work in a mild state of trance, to my mind enchantingly eccentric, given to big hats and grand gestures and apparently completely oblivious to the fact that she’s old enough to be my mother. One day she says her friends want to know when we’re getting married. I say, “October?”

Of course I can’t see that I’m being deeply loyal to my parents. I’ve married a woman who sees herself as a misunderstood artist, too sensitive and interior for this world; I somehow don’t notice how drunk she gets at parties, how her face crumples and shifts when she drinks; it’s only on weekends, only every once in a while. I can’t see that I’m doing just what my father did, signing on to take care of a woman who refuses responsibility for herself. I’m doing just what I felt I should do as a boy: rescue that woman, make her happy, be the one who will please her, at any cost. Years later I’ll shudder and laugh at once in my shrink’s office, when we talk about the fact that my mother and my ex-wife have the same first name: two Ruths, two strange fusions of Southern-lady vulnerability and wills of steel. I don’t know any of that now. At seventeen I’m barely learning to live outside my parents’ house. You could say I am hiding from myself, which I am, or running away from home, which is also true. But at least I am stumbling toward safety; I’m lost, and any strong pole, any anchor will do. I am fumbling my way through the unchartable territory of sex, of my first foolish tries at adult love, though the notion of a life founded in my own desire is still a prospect unimaginably far away.