Linda’s skin is powdery warm brown silk. Picture gold. Her chin is pointed. Her cheekbones are sloped. She has blue eyes like a plastic doll’s—circular, sparkling clear-glass marbles—and long eyelashes, a wide mouth, soft lips, and long thick brown hair. She has a battery of predictable human expressions. She’s talked about becoming a schoolteacher, or a psychologist, like the neighbors on either side of us, women who do something, who found a skill. I wish she’d do that. I wish she would. She took time off from her old job—she hated clothing sales, driving to malls, selling Donna Karan—and then talked herself into retiring forever, but she can’t stay retired forever.

You know that pain you feel when you see an incredibly beautiful face: You look at her and you want to know what she’s thinking and you’re sitting there guessing and you don’t even come close? You have to kiss her and hold her sweet face in your hands and shove her down somewhere and get on top of her and make her all yours—even when she is yours? Even when she loves you, too? Even when she’s your wife and she gave you everything she had? I look at her and I feel that pain. If I had it to do again, I’d marry a woman who didn’t have such remarkable luck, who was born with a face like a horse, a face like a Russian carrot farmer, with whiskers, who maybe blossomed later in life, someone who was forced to be a human being before giving up, or a fat one, even, so she doesn’t snap at you.

SUNDAY MORNING I drove in to work with the excuse of grabbing a disk and spent the day there, editing videotape on the computer. When I came home, the cars were sitting in the driveway exactly where I’d left them. I found Linda kneeling in the garden, with Barbara lying on a chaise in the sun nearby, looking into the sky with my binoculars. I asked where the father was. They said he was in the guest room on the phone. I went over to Linda and gave her a kiss. It made a hollow, sucking noise. She looked at me, panicked.

I said, “Relax.”

She said, “I know.”

Her skin looked worse. It was shiny from ointment. She stared ahead, her neck veins bulging. “He ate all the ice today,” she said.

I said, “That’s O.K.”

She said, “He chomps it,” and moved her jaws up and down, showing me. She was looking to me for some kind of recognition.

I said, “The refrigerator makes more automatically.”

Linda sighed, panting. She said, “I feel like I’m five years old again.”

I said, “You’re O.K. It’s fine.”