We were on the phone. Before we hung up, something prompted me to ask him about the painting in the living room. (Watching over us—ha! said my friend, giving her the finger as we were vacating the house.) He told me that they’d bought it at an estate auction. We were both quite taken with it, he said. At first we thought it was a mistake, the way it dominated the living room. Then it turned out to be a good conversation piece. But my wife—no, she never looked anything like that, the man said. And he chuckled a bit.

Is that you? the water damage inspector asked me when he saw the painting.

II

If I’d kept a journal, I could tell you exactly when it was that we stopped speaking. By then, we were ensconced in my friend’s apartment. After the house, the apartment felt small, but, again, I had my own room. I unpacked and settled in—again not knowing for how long—and took up the same routine. I did the grocery shopping and whatever other errands needed doing. The weekly housecleaner had been let go when my friend left the apartment for what she’d thought was for good, and so that job now also fell to me. I threw myself into it until she begged me to stop. The noise of the vacuum cleaner, the odor of disinfectant—these and other such ordinary stimuli had become intolerable to her. Her skin was now so sensitive that even silk could rub it raw.

But when she discovered her bedroom window fouled with pigeon splat she insisted that I wash it right away. That done, we decided I should wash all the windows, much as the ammonia smell revolted her.

She was glad to be home, my friend said. She held on to the idea that going away had been a mistake, a surrender to faulty thinking, for which she’d been punished.

Now that she was back home, she would never leave the apartment again. Even when she was feeling well enough, she did not want to go out—not even to the park just across the street from her building, which had long been a favorite place of hers and was now, in midsummer, a haven of deep green shade. She had started having trouble with her balance and was terrified of falling. And there was something else: having reached the next—the final—stage of her journey, she had turned in on herself.

Returning from some errand, I sometimes stole a few minutes in the park before going indoors.

Usually, as soon as I sat down on one of the benches, I would cry.

Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable. But doesn’t love always feel just so: destined, no matter how unexpected, no matter how improbable.