I was feeling, not exactly blue myself, but certainly wistful, more than a bit left out. He would be back in a day or two. Once he was composing here again, maybe things’d calm back down, our old schedule regained. Increasingly to me, that in itself seemed paradise.

It usually helped to scuff over here, check out his place, then head right back to my own, smaller digs. He’d been gone for ten whole days. By phone three nights back, Ang and I reinventoried his merits—finding a few new ones—then, as ever, we sighed, made the kissy sound, and hung up, each of us still alone.

Tonight I’d brought along my manuscript, I moved to turn on the crook-neck lamp clamped onto his hospital breakfast tray. I felt giddy, sinuses burning, then heard something in the corner by the broom closet. Floorboards creaked twice, stopped, continued. My eyes had at last grown half-accustomed to the half-dark.

Just then a police car passed, its red flasher spinning, and—with that—I slowly made out two forms. Caucasian, they were somewhat crimped atop each other, right down on the kitchen floor. The two were stretched out not fourteen feet from me. Maybe I had been so silent in arriving barefoot. Maybe the kitchen counter blocked whatever view they’d have of me. This place was often lent to whatever couples Robert currently promoted. Maybe that was how this pair came to be here, certainly making good use of Robbie’s floorspace.

Came a louder thumping, old planks all but croaking with greater pressure and fixed grunts. It sounded like the usual wrestling had overshot even a particularly good athletic fuck. I considered tiptoeing right back out. I couldn’t really see them, be they guys or girls, could only hear their strain, could just squint toward bareness, an act quite unmistakable. “No, not … Daaaddy, not that one …” the voice, some adolescent boy’s, half-known, and then, I, driven, sick, reached for lamp and met—in its bleaching light—two faces turning this way.

Their mouths hung open, one just above the other. A totem pole of grimace. Each mask varnished in sweat. On the floor, near her splayed palms, a small brown jar, two emptied bottles of champagne. With such light in their faces, their heads looked big, rounded, somehow ringed—jagged cutaways of great tree trunks newly felled. Though I already knew, I told myself I couldn’t recognize the couple. Though they aimed my way, though half the kitchen chopping block shielded them, I—like a kid, determined to deny everything while missing nothing “good”—scampered to the bed’s far end. I clung to the pineappled upright due Northwest. Suddenly slowly it registered.

Their eyes were like the only four red vents they had to breathe through. Under Robert was not a boy he was so seriously fucking in the bum, but a person distinctly Angie-like. Yes. Mine, ours, her, it, us. Them. Doing this. He’s the tops, she’s bottom-feeding, really truly getting it.