“Why do you have to be such a fucking bore? You’re such a fucking bore. What a bore. You’re both two fucking bores.”

He stands watching her a moment, then he leaves. Suddenly, she springs up, a full-blown woman again. I watch him entering the streets below. He waves to us from the street, without turning around.

“We three used to have such fun,” Catherine says. “Do you remember what a good time we used to have? How we used to play? You’re both such bores now.”

“You can’t play all the time.”

“Well at least he can keep Saturdays for play.”

Down below, a man in a straw hat leads a donkey whose back is loaded with straw chairs tied with a rope. The man spends his days weaving straw chairs. I wonder what such a life is like.

“Bores.”

“You used to say that just being in our company made you happy. Now we have to perform for you.”

“Why not? Like the song says, ‘Everybody wants to be in show business.’ ”

“Is that what you’re in?”

“Say what?”

“Show business. Or what my folks call ‘showing off.’ Is that what you’re doing? ‘Showing off’ every time you try it? Are you so fucking bored that trying to kill him adds the only excitement . . .?”

“Anyway, is that why you left your husband?” she asks.

“What?”

“Because he was a fucking bore? Because you were so fucking bored?”

I won’t give her that. I won’t agree to it.

“People bore themselves.”

“Bullshit. I never bore myself.”

She shrinks down in her chair again.

“Did he ever make you feel small? That’s what I really mean.”

She needed to know.

“Yeah,” I give her. “I guess so. I guess at times. All men do at times. So they can feel men I guess.”

“He makes me feel small all the time. Small all the time.”

She’s already a small woman, and right now there’s peach fuzz in the corner of her mouth. Electrolysis, baby.

“Small’s not paradise.”

Yeah, I could be telling her, I’ve known men like that, who make me feel smaller than I suspect I am. But when I think of Ernest, I think of the opposite. I feel full-blown or larger than I suspect I am. A better woman. But I cannot tell her that. But don’t we all want to be in the presence of someone who makes us feel larger and better than what we can ourselves imagine we could ever be?

“I feel like he’s standing on my head,” says Catherine. “I feel like he’s standing on my head and hammering me down.”

It is unfair of me to tell her what I can or can’t believe of the man. Certainly I cannot see the Ernest that she sees, but then she can’t see—all right I’ll say it—my Ernest.

My Ernest? Describe to you the Ernest I see? Married to an impossible woman. Bewildered and bemused by his situation. He wants to see his wife happy and productive, and he tries to put her in places that will allow her to be. There are his types, I suppose; you know them: big, protective, nurturing men, the ones you think about when you’re in trouble (and out of it) but who seem always there for the rescue of others (and you wonder who rescues them); two-hearted men, I call them, like Hemingway described that river. Sometimes I imagine I’m here for his rescue as much as Catherine’s; at least I fly to them as much for his sake as hers, to steer him as much as I can out of harm’s way.