So if you could tell them that, I would appreciate it, because I’d really rather not have any new appointments. And I can’t take medicine that will trap me in my dreams. I have to be able to wake up. I have to know that I’ll be able to wake up, or I’ll never sleep. Never! And I’ll begin to spin round and round like water going down a drain, and then, I’ll be gone. Gone! Like the dodo! No, I’m all right, please don’t go, you don’t have to call anyone, really. See? I’ll sit still like a lady.

I know it’s not for me to say, I know that, but really, it was, last night I mean, it was really just because of the snoring.

9

Today M needed his beautiful suits to be beautifully clean. I wanted to be helpful, I had my purple dry-cleaning zip-bag. We could make a day of it. If every minute went just right I could clean the apartment, drop off the suits, stop by the market for the dinner things and spend the afternoon beside the pump. Every minute was a card and I could build the most beautiful house out of the day. I could buy raspberries at the market and eat them with E while B napped, we could carve out little secrets together like that if we were careful. Little secrets could be ways to love each other. I drank two or three glasses of wine every day at five o’clock. Little secrets could be ways, too, to love myself.

M wouldn’t be back for dinner, he had said this crawling into bed, latelatelate the night before, smelling of red wine, maybe cigarettes. Or maybe I just imagined that he did. Maybe I hoped he did have dinner somewhere nice, a steak, a glass of wine, leaning back in his chair discussing something important with other important people, people who would understand important things. Or discussing something unimportant, laughing, and that being a break, a much needed break, from thinking about and discussing important things. How could I have not hoped for this?

He couldn’t come home for dinner at all anymore, not for a little while. He said this, his hand finding my shoulder in the bed in the dark, his finger brushing over the small place where there was just the thinnest layer of skin over bone, and moving on, wanting something, a pillow maybe. We were sometimes like this, waymarkers, even if just a shoulder, weren’t we? Wasn’t that what we had, after all, promised always to be for each other?

Anyway he couldn’t come, he was needed for interviews, meetings, drinks after work. Water beading along the side of a cocktail glass set on a table overlooking the lake. Ice-cold martinis, highballs, glasses clinking together, business cards, beautiful suits.

So we would not need to wait for M in the evenings and E and I could eat cream and melon and crackers if we wanted to. When M came home, whenever he came home, we would all be there breathing the same air. I drifted back into my half-sleep, waking, turning, slipping the other nipple into B’s mouth. Sleep was like a dragonfly in my hands, always fluttering, always trying to get away from me.