My second wife had a passion for houses. We didn’t stay long in the hotel after my first wife agreed to the divorce and went back East. Our first house was modest. It was on a hilltop. It was the year for hilltops. We acquired a boxer: the first of our dogs to go with the first of our houses. We had this marvelous view: you know, lights? And horizons? But then the view, magnificent as it was, began to pall. Oh, just a little. My second wife had a look that always preceded the palling of something: a certain pinched look. About the mouth. And at the edges of her fine nostrils. You know: the mute evidence she was deprived of something. So the slope outside our house was terraced. And after the terraces came the pool. And after the pool, the enlargement of the living room. The boxer got extremely nervous. When it was all completed, the slope bordered with flowers, the pool filled, the living room extended its ten imperative feet, then the hilltop revealed itself as being the true source of her dissatisfaction. She complained it was too isolated, that friends hesitated to drive up its steep path, that we were too much alone though, at the time I’d bought the house, it was this isolation and the no friends and the opportunity to be alone that had seemed so desirable. So the hilltop was exchanged for something flat and ranchy: with trees down a driveway: and the boxer got a lady boxer because, I supposed, he too was a victim of the isolated view. We now looked out to a neighbor’s wire fence, his horses, his children’s treehouse, his luau parties, his searchlights over his patio. He kept guns, this neighbor, and owned a string of pizza parlors. I lived in the hope, rather strong in the beginning but diminishing as the years went on, that something would one day erase forever that pinched look from my second wife’s fine nostrils. Nothing did. Our third, and as it happened final, house was I think almost satisfactory to my second wife: it was the former home (albeit run down a bit) of a sugar millionaire. You know: spacious? Imitation high-beamed Spanish, and all. Porte-cochere, and all. Guest cabañas, and all. A frigidaire (she kept cold grapes, guavas, fruit juices from her indispensable blender in it always) squatted beside the pool, larger and squarer than our pool on the hilltop had been. The sugar heir’s home represented, if anything represented, the apex of my success. A success, naturally, reflected in our friends: my second wife always tactfully acquired the sort of friends that went with the sort of house. Equal, a little less than equal, a bit more than equal: those were the criteria. She was really still in business: it was simply I was now her gift shoppe. Oh, she ran the house well. The servants (from Negro to Spanish Mexican to young Swedish girls) didn’t stay too long. Madame was, frankly, a pain in the ass. Still, there we were: married. And still, I said to myself: what she is doing is, of course, for my own good. I needed pushing. I needed organizing. I needed being run. And was obscurely flattered still that I’d been chosen by her to be run. For marriage, I told myself, was surely a partnership. So the textbooks said. So the experience testified. Articles of incorporation, monthly balance sheets, mutual indebtedness, and all. Anyway, I’d certainly acquired a partner though going into business with a woman wasn’t exactly what I had in mind those nights when I’d gone out for a pack of cigarettes and took so long in opening the pack.