Rich was trying to know her, but of course he couldn’t know her, because now he was marrying her, because he was her now and you can’t understand what you are while you’re in it. She had been miserable since they got engaged, and had let him know it. It wasn’t her fault, he understood, because he, too, was now turning into a short lady with skirts and buckled shoes, a hundred and eleven pounds, trying to keep it under control. A number of things led to her/their misery, and all were his fault. The skin under her armpits broke out from his cheap CVS lotion; her right hip was sore from screwing, her leg became shorter, her left knee and ankle went wrong from that—see how he’d torn her apart by this engagement? By his stabbing her with his penis he’d sprained a muscle on her hip that was too delicate for engagement. Her shoes, the best ones, were now defunct. She would come down in the morning and hold a toe out toward his cereal—“See how my flats are awful?” She could no longer go to the gym, she could no longer do African dance, she could no longer eat turkey sausages because they gave her gas. “Boys eat that stuff.” He burnt his sausages in a frying pan, and the burnt parts could give a person cancer, but the fumes made her hungry so she ate. In the spring, she began her protest. If he cooked meats, she ate shaves of green salad off the tip of a razor-sharp cleaver, with lemon; she threw away her fruit half eaten, stood over the garbage and yawned and it fell out.

He opened up a gift from Gynnie’s aunt in Europe and out came a broken antique cuckoo clock.

She dropped so much weight her ass wrinkled. He shared her pain. They were both cramping, aging, walking stiffly. He slept in a push-up position. He was sort of atrophying, moving as if his feet had been burned, in a shortened stride, like Dr. Locascio, his dental surgeon, who he hated. She was walking like Barney the purple dinosaur, empty smile, her hands clasped in front of her. They’d reached this state of disrepair from holding it together.

Gynnie had left a message (she was already in France—it was evening here, it was very late there). He called Martina’s house, where the event would take place, and somehow Gynnie picked up the phone. He was so glad to hear her sweet whispering voice that he felt like crying and silently prayed to love her forever. He thought she might have said, “I love you so much,” and was already delivered to her, kind of swooning, and asked her to repeat herself because the connection was weird and he wanted to hear those words again.

She said, “If my tiara gets bent I’m going to kill myself.”