It wasn’t as if she had a time clock to punch, or a life, really. But after she’d gone to work for the Boss, little by little she’d stopped going to museums, to the theater, to the galleries, to newsstands or Barnes & Noble.

She tried to remember the last time she’d tucked herself into the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized musicians in the park or been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.

She’d become a bug in amber, trapped in lives she didn’t know or care about. Gossip. The tawdry, banal goings-on of people who had the heart and soul of paper dolls. Why did she care what Michael Jackson wore to court? What difference did it make to her or anyone else that Madonna had fallen off her horse?

Instead of looking at art, Shrew had started looking into the toilet of life, taking delight in other people’s shit. She began to realize a number of truths as she thought about her dark ride home along the River Styx of Lexington Avenue in the black Cadillac sedan. The man in the cowboy hat had been nice to her, even patted her knee as she’d gotten out of his car, but he’d never given her his name, and common sense had warned her not to ask.

She’d walked right into evil tonight. First Marilyn Monroe, then the worm, then the basement. Maybe God had just administered spiritual electroshock therapy of sorts, by showing her the truth about the heartless way she lived, and she looked around her rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, and possibly for the first time since her husband was no longer in it, she saw what it really looked like, and that it hadn’t changed.

The corduroy sofa and matching chair were unpretentious and comforting, and the worn nappy texture brought her husband back to the living room. She saw him sitting in the recliner, reading the Times, chewing on the butt of a cigar until it was slimy, and she smelled the smoke that used to saturate every molecule of their lives. She smelled it now as if she’d never brought in professional cleaners.

For several seasons, she couldn’t muster up the courage to clear out his clothes and tuck away items she couldn’t bear to look at or part with.

How often had she lectured him not to cross the street just because the white man on the traffic signal assured him it was fine?

How was that any less stupid than standing on the sidewalk because the red hand forbade him to walk, even though the cross-street was barricaded, not a car in sight?