I sat in the park waiting for Aurora, not sure that I ought to be sitting here waiting, and I thought, as I sat, how it had happened that I had gotten married for the second time. You marry once. After ten years, you are convinced that the marriage is a mistake. So you marry again. After ten years, that marriage, too, presents itself to you as a mistake. Well: apparently, what one ran out of was not mistakes, but the years to make them in.

I had lived then in something called the Cheshire Towers. It had towers, too. On top. Battlemented. Quite the fortress. My first wife (she had a dim reality for me now: the alimony payments were a bit more vivid to me than she was) had been a dark, slender creature. She imagined herself to be an actress. We had no children.

I somehow kept marrying women who for one reason or another preferred not to, or could not, conceive children. My first wife would not because she was always about to have a career in the theatre which, of course, she never had: my second wife, with no theatrical ambitions at all, was mysteriously barren. Both marriages, therefore, had this neat sterility about them. Still, I can’t say that for myself there was any driving need to have children. Fine if they came along: but they didn’t come along for more or less the reasons I’ve mentioned, although it is also possible that my own indifference to children may have contributed to the curious sterility of both my marriages. Anyway: twenty years, and no issue.

In the Cheshire Towers, my first wife, as her theatrical longings went unsatisfied, took more and more to disliking to go out. We lived rather high up, in the building, we had this nice view of the river, and the pyschology of why she found it more and more distasteful (and, finally, almost impossible) to go out was relatively simple: disappointment was down below. She drifted about the apartment, in various costumes, and she drank wine. There is no point in documenting the amount of wine my first wife drank, or the long vague afternoons she spent drifting from room to room, pausing, now and then, for a long abstracted morose contemplation of the river. The important thing is that I began to dread going home. I began to dread the dark falling and the clockhand moving toward the dinner hour. Still, in a marriage, for reasons comprehensible to no one at all, you go on. On! As though it were a direction. I gave up imploring her. Hiding the wine. Buying tickets for openings in the hope she’d leave the apartment. All the damn therapeutics. Frankly, by then, if she’d leaned too far out of the window one summer’s evening I might have hesitated, oh, just fractionally, to rush to her before she started to fall. And yet: and yet: I’d loved her once. A flat rock in the woods, the sunlight filtered through the pines, I’d loved her once.