The second I met Linda, I knew she was the one. We were so cool together. Everything was easy. She was way better-looking than anyone I’d ever dated before. We’d sit around all night watching TV, making out, eating tacos in our underwear. It was heaven, playing together like children, touching, feeling, learning all the hidden stuff (I hate sports, she smoked PCP in high school). I bought her cheap silly presents every day on my way home from work. She made my balls go slack when she looked at me. Sometimes she looked at me so hard her eyes crossed. It was beautiful. We decided to get married, and then she told me she was rich, and that was terrific. We bought the land and built the house and moved out here.

What were we doing? I gave her this dog, on our first anniversary, and we’d sit on the floor together and talk to it, petting its fur—it was small and soft then. Linda’s voice would grow quiet and I’d feel calm, and she’d call it funny names and kiss it; or kiss me, or I’d rub Linda’s soft golden forearm and lean over and kiss the back of her silky head, the beautiful smell of shampoo surrounding her, and I could feel the bitterness drain out of me. “Don’t think,” I’d say to myself. “It’s cool.” We had an awesome lifestyle. I wanted to enjoy it. The dog was a puppy when we got him, a furry black ball, but now he was an enormous, shedding mutt; the muscles bulged in a ring around his concrete head as he tore up tennis balls in his jaws and swallowed the pieces. It was my job to walk him at night, and I’d stand in the driveway and watch him piss, and see if he had shit where I had to walk. I’d look at the sky and get lonely. I’d go around shutting off the lights in our big, empty house. That feeling got me every night for at least a second. I’d walk upstairs and hug Linda and hold on, and it took all my troubles away.

FRIDAY AFTER WORK I went to the food store. Linda waxed the floor in the foyer. She vacuumed the carpets, barely able to talk, drained of energy, polishing the table from a lying position on the couch—a scared, pathetic mess. It was awful to watch. I felt sorry for her, and that night we went to bed at nine o’clock. She sat on the covers in a nightshirt with the front unbuttoned and her tits hanging out and put together her Scrabble set and asked me to play. She wanted to organize her brain into letters—“letters that make words”—so her mind could make sense, so she could think, so she could sleep. She said, “I think I’m worried.”