In charge by default, he told her, “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. Can you hop, holding on to my shoulder?” They made it to the car, to the emergency room of the local hospital, where a crude cast was fashioned, and the next day to Massachusetts General Hospital, an hour away in Boston.

For the month afterwards, they did not make love, though he demonstrated love, in his own eyes, by bringing her meals he prepared, by learning to do the laundry and the cooking, and by playing backgammon and watching public television with her at night. After the month, they agreed they should try sex again, though she would have to lie safely still beneath him, and he must be careful of her mending bones. At Mass. General she had been prescribed not a plaster cast but, in the latest therapeutic fashion, a plastic boot—space-tech in feeling, overlapping blue and gray with a ridged sole curved like a chair rocker. It could be briefly removed but had to stay on during something as strenuous as fucking. He tried to hover above her, on his elbows and knees, sparing her as much of his weight as he could, and to his grateful amazement felt her rise to him, in her excitement, quicker than usual; she ground her pubic bone against his decisively and they came together—gemlike dragonflies coupling in air. Breathless afterwards, Julia stared up at him from the pillow with that cloudy face of satisfied desire which puts a man, briefly, right with the universe, all debts honored, all worries unmasked as negligible.