Eleanor, had she been alive, would have made fun of Ernest, not because he was a man (which might have thrilled her) but because he was conventional. A terrible insult, from Eleanor. To not know Faust was the fiction and Goethe the German! They had never had children because she had a horror of a living thing inside her body; she said she couldn’t believe that modern science hadn’t figured out a less barbaric way to reproduce. One that might allow you to drink as much as you liked, for instance: the studies were just coming out, then, suggesting in utero alcohol was a bad idea. (So why, he imagined her saying now, surveying the Schlitterbahn crowds, did children ever since seem to be getting stupider?) She was the author of most of Bruno’s opinions. Holding them was his way of keeping her alive; not insisting on them was his way of doing the same for himself. She had started to lose her memory. Could be early Alzheimer’s, her doctor said, or arteriosclerosis, or more likely alcoholic insult to the brain, and Bruno hadn’t cared: you don’t worry about arson or faulty wiring till after the structure has fully burned to the ground. She’d died in the swimming pool at their apartment complex, drowned, full of vodka and valium, she who’d once swum laps for an hour every morning. Maybe she’d forgotten how many pills she’d taken. Maybe she’d merely remembered the full measure of what she’d lost. You must have known, said Ernest, when they fell in love a year later, you knew all along about yourself, you liked men. Bruno could only say, I was waiting for you.

He and Eleanor had been married in a sad ritual. Her parents were dead; his mother, who was only ten years older than Eleanor, had hated her immediately. Eleanor had bought a white dress, because Bruno had told her that his mother cared about such things. His mother had laughed in her face. “Well,” said Eleanor, afterward, “we’ll never do that again, thank God.”