“You say things differently. You intellectualize.”

“Maybe that’s my nature.”

“It didn’t used to be.”

“I’ve changed, people do change.”

“That’s just what I said.”

“I wish you wouldn’t—”

“What?”

“Point things out. Do you always have to point things out?”

“I can’t help it.”

“You could stop yourself.”

“That wouldn’t be me.”

Once they went to a restaurant to celebrate the birth of their second son. The restaurant was inexpensive and the food only moderately good. After coffee, after glasses of recklessly ordered brandy, Peter slipped away to the telephone. A business call, he said to Barbara. He would only be a minute or two. From where she sat she could see him behind the glass door of the phone booth, his uplifted arm, his patient explanation, and his glance at his watch—then his face reshaped itself into furrows of explosive laughter.

She had been filled with a comradely envy for his momentary connection, and surprised by her lack of curiosity, how little she cared who was on the other end of the line, a client or a lover, it didn’t matter. A conversation was in progress. Words were being mainlined straight into Peter’s ear, and the overflow of his conversation traveled across the dull white tablecloths and reached her too, filling her emptiness, or part of it.

Between the two of them they have accumulated a minor treasury of anecdotes beginning with “Remember when we-” and this literature of remembrance sometimes traps them into smugness. And, occasionally, when primed by a solid period of calm, they are propelled into the blue-tinged pre-history of that epoch before they met.

“When I was in Denver that time—”

“I never knew you were in Denver.”

“My mother took me there once....”

“You never told me your mother took you to....”

But Barbara is tenderly protective of her beginnings. She is also, oddly, protective of Peter’s. Eruptions from this particular and most cherished layer of time are precious and dangerous; retrieval betrays it, smudges it.

“There’s something wrong,” Barbara said to Peter some years ago, “and I don’t know how to tell you.”

They were standing in a public garden near their house, walking between beds of tulips.

“You don’t love me,” he guessed, amazing her, and himself.

“I love you but not enough.”

“What is enough?” he cried and reached out for the cotton sleeve of her dress.