“I’m finding it harder and harder to fuck my own wife,” he wrote.

Fuck? Wife?

The act has become something burdensome to me. Costanza is off on this path, lost on this path. It’s all about the day of the month, the twinges in her ovaries, the consistency of her mucus, her temperature. What happened to me? Us? What happened to all the rest of our lives? By some miraculous luck I’ve generally been able to perform (and that is the appropriate word too), but I know that this cannot go on forever. Already I’m not with her when I’m with her; nowhere near. I am elsewhere, in my fantasy life. This is not what I anticipated, in making this marriage. I no longer know what I anticipated. I was deluded; I fear that I was seduced by an idea about life (knit more tightly into what exactly?). Many mornings now I wake up and wonder, How did I become married, anyway? Costanza is a perfectly splendid woman, but she and I want such—

Here she made his skin tingle, and he wanted to slide his penis inside her to forestall death; on page 400 their lovemaking had become burdensome to him and she was a perfectly splendid woman.

For the first time in more than a year Costanza was angry. She could feel this unfamiliar, almost oily sensation bubbling up in her. She could taste it. It came up out of her stomach and into her mouth. Now, all of a sudden, she wasn’t so inclined to be tugged back into the World of Morton. She wasn’t so curious after all, she realized, to hear Morton think aloud about how he decided not to go ahead with the fertility treatment. She didn’t want to know how he justified denying her the experience she most desperately wanted in life. She didn’t want to see how he reasoned his way out of their marriage and back into his selfish, rigid, arid cocoon. She didn’t even particularly want to know what it felt like for him to know he was dying.

She couldn’t very well strike out at dead Morton. All she could do was send him back to the past, where he belonged. She picked up the manuscript and shoved it into her suitcase and shoved the suitcase into the closet. She would return to it some other day.

Or maybe not.