That was the first lunch. I was puzzled. He dislikes me, I thought, and went no further, because who wants to enter the head of the person who hates you? But it also occurred to me that he might have had a stomach upset—he tended to be bilious in every sense—and maybe it was too painful for him to talk about. Maybe he was depressed, though apart from his divorce from his first wife long ago and a period of deep gloom, I’d never known Frank to be depressed. He made a point of being jaunty, especially in his cruel teasing. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and began to think I was reading too much into his ambiguous stories and his uneaten meal. That plate he’d left, however, the mass of food, that slop disturbed me. He had hovered over the plate, and lumped it and pushed it around, making it his own, then rejected it, making a sort of statement I needed to interpret—very Frank.

Yet my birthday. He had not mentioned it, nor had he given me a present as he often did, even a token, as in the past, like the key chain, or baseball cap, or ballpoint pen, logo items he’d gotten free at a luxury hotel. I knew they were cheesy mementos he’d regifted, yet they showed he remembered.

And my cobalt strike, the Idaho mine, a big payday—he had not said anything about that either; and speculation, mentioning me, had been in the business news that Frank habitually read when trawling for clients.

He had not asked about Vita, and in the past he had never failed to do so.

You think: Odd not to mention any of this, but one of Frank’s perversities was emphasizing the importance of something by not bringing it up. I wondered whether that was the case at this lunch, and of course there was the sight of his mangled plate of food that he’d left looking punished, an obvious power move.

That night I told Vita about the lunch—the stories, the uneaten food, the references that seemed directed at me. As we were going through a bad patch at the time, I suppose I was looking for sympathy.

“He’s a piece of work,” she said, yet before I could agree she said, “But so are you.”

“It’s my birthday, Vee. He didn’t say a word about it.”

“That’s the sort of thing you might do.”

“Maybe by accident, but this seemed deliberate.”

“You forgot my birthday one year.”

“I was prospecting in Zambia, Vee!”

“Husband comes down with a severe case of amnesia in Zambia,” Vita said.

One of the characteristics of a troubled marriage is that wisps of half-remembered slights from the distant past appear fully formed and offensive in the present, to be marshaled as evidence.