“Oh. That, too,” he said. “A relief, frankly. A lot of men spend most of their lives going around feeling like dogs. When I look back, if I’m honest I’d say that on the whole my sex life was more degrading than satisfying to me. If there’d been a drug to kill my libido I would’ve taken it, at least during my wilder years. It would have made me a better person. Anyway, I’ve become something of a monomaniac, it’s true. These days I only write and lecture about one thing. Even if it does make me feel like Cassandra. Even if people do hate me so much that they make death threats. Thank God I’m single now and living alone. But it’s not just strangers, you know. A lot of friends have dropped me. My own son is barely speaking to me because I didn’t hide how appalled I was that his wife is expecting their third child. Doesn’t want me anywhere near her. Says I’m enough to scare her into a miscarriage.”

“So you already have two grandchildren. I didn’t know that.”

“Two boys, five and three.”

How do others deal with it. For years you share a life, the same house, the same bed, the same (or so you dare to believe) future plans. You spend so much time together, rarely make a move without consulting the other, reach a point where it’s hard to say where one of you ends and the other begins—

“Do you have any photos?”

—and then, incredibly within the same lifetime (and how short, after all, is that) comes a day when you know nothing of even the most important details of the other one’s life.

“Of course. But I know you don’t really want to see them, you’re just being polite.”

That time on the subway: wondering why on earth that man was smiling at me, until he leaned forward and said his name. A dozen years earlier, fresh out of school, we’d set up house together. Somehow I had failed to recognize this great love of my life (now married, it turned out, and a new father) sitting across from me on the uptown express.

“But that must be very painful for you, given how pessimistic you are about their future.”

Was it that he had changed so much, or that I had buried him so deep, six feet under my heart.

“Unbearable.”