At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. Margot had said that with my rotund stomach, veiny, spindly legs, and left-leaning posture I was beginning to resemble my father just before his death. Did that matter? What did I think a younger body would bring me? More love? Even I knew that that wasn’t what I required as much as the ability to love more.
I waited up for my wife, watched her undress, and followed her instruction to sit in the bathroom as she bathed by candlelight, attending to her account of the day and—the highlight for me—who had annoyed her the most. She and I also liked to discuss our chocolate indulgences and bodies: which part of which of us, for example, seemed full of ice cream and was expanding. Various diets and possible types of exercise were always popular between us. She liked to accuse me of not being “toned,” of being, in fact, “mush,” but threatened murder and suicide if I mentioned any of her body parts without reverence. As I looked at her with her hair up, wearing a dressing gown and examining and cleaning her face in the mirror, I wondered how many more such ordinary nights we would have together.
A few minutes after getting into bed, she was slipping into sleep. I resented her ability to drop off. Although sleeping had come to seem more luxurious, I hadn’t got any better at it. I guess children and older adults fear the separation from consciousness, as though it’ll never return. If anyone asked me, I said that consciousness was the thing I liked most about life. But who doesn’t need a rest from it now and again?
Lying beside Margot, chatting and sleeping, was exceptional every night. To be well married you have to have a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change: to be interested, for instance, in people dreaming together. If the personality is a spider’s web, you will want to know every thread. Otherwise, after forty, when the color begins to drain from the world, it’s either retirement or reinvention. Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them.
Later, unusually—it had been a long time—she woke me up to make love, which I did happily, telling her that I’d always loved her, and reminiscing, as we often did, about how we met and got together. These were our favorite stories, always the same and also slightly different so that I listened out for a new feeling or aspect.
For the rest of the night I was awake, walking about the house, wondering.