This partner, then, with whom I slept, in a manner of speaking, increased my holdings, secured my financial, or her financial, or our financial, wellbeing, and for several years devoted herself to me and to our marriage as she would have to any fledgling business that needed her complete attention.

Sitting in a restaurant with Aurora, I thought then of the death of my second wife’s father. There are episodes to which one always returns not quite believing that one participated in them. The death of my second wife’s father was such an episode.

When we had been married five years, and had begun the occupancy of the sugar heir’s former home, my second wife’s father decided to visit us.

I liked the old man. He was a little man and he wore wide-legged baggy trousers. Once, because he was in California and in such an elegant house, he appeared in white flannels. They were white flannels he had probably worn to Asbury Park in the summer of 1918. He felt quite the sport in his white flannels. My second wife couldn’t endure the sight of them. They made, not her father, but herself, ridiculous. Up went Papa to the bedroom and changed meekly back to his dark baggy trousers. He ate breakfast like a man in a corrective institution.

Everything, it didn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, was a source of wonder to the old man. The garbage disposal unit? He clucked and shook his head. Such an invention! No more trolleys in the city? Amazing! The world, in Papa’s opinion, had become incredibly clever. In his time nobody thought of such things. Ergo: the world was indisputably cleverer than it had been, and maybe his daughter was right: the white flannels of Asbury Park were ridiculous. He submitted to the superiority of the world that had invented garbage disposal units.

The second week her father was about the house my second wife started to get her pinched look. I took the old man to the track, to the ballgame, once to the studio. He was, of course, delighted. There’s nothing better to prove how much cleverer we’ve become than the manufacture of motion pictures. Anyway, if the old man had sat in his upstairs bedroom and watched television and read his True Detective magazines, everything would probably have been all right. That is, his humiliations would have been minor. But he was lonely and he liked to talk to people. He’d come downstairs at a party or a dinner. When she had sort of implied he shouldn’t. And buttonhole some actor. Then the clucking and the marvelous shaking of his head began.

That watch told the day of the month as well as the time?

Incredible.

A what kind of car? It cost how much? Up and down, automatic?

Unbelievable.

There is such doctors? Fix breasts? Bigger?

He goggled. He was benumbed by these amazing lives and these amazing gadgets.

My second wife was getting more pinched about her famous and fine nostrils. Papa was impossible. She cringed with embarrassment. There was only one thing to do. Out! That was the thing.