She thinks he is having an affair. How can you live in a place, and not have a life in that place? she asks. This is not the only question she asks. There will always be affairs. There will always be the past. He gestures at the spot in front of them. He puts his hand on her leg. This is not the moment she says: I know, I know, am I being crazy? I'm being crazy. Don't tell me I'm being crazy. She turns over and it is not that she is giving up or letting him do it. He aims and she puts it in. Oh, she says. She does not say it to make him feel good. She tells him to do it. She wants him to do it. He does it. Don't I love you? he asks. She stands in front of him. She nods. He wants to stop it right where it is. He wants to touch the ruffle between her breasts. There, he says. How can they be there? One hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two. He counts to make it last longer. She is sure that something must matter. Love, she says, is not enough. Enough is enough, he says.

Lines

He had a hard time recalling.

"C'mon," somebody said.

"Just spit it out," another said.

"Something about a droopy eyelid," he said.

"And?" somebody said.

"So?" another said.

"There's more," he said. His eyes were watching the ceiling. Lines of light, cars passing, lies on the open street. "Something about her condition," he said. "She said, 'they think it can be controlled.' No. Something else. She said: 'It can probably be controlled.' "

The room got dark.

"I've sat next to people like that," somebody said.

"I've felt them crying very near me," another said.

He put his head in his hands. He couldn't see through his hands. The room was getting darker.

The next thing he knew, he was holding on. She was shaking.

The Two of Them

Rena said: "You think you can't, and then you can't." It was really a question about the inevitable. That was after the surgery, but before they knew he would get better. Rena said she was going to leave and Morts said: "No, don't leave, where are you going? Please don't leave."

He knew she was just going to work. She was only going to work.

She said: "Quit being a baby."

She said: "Stop it right now."

He was still in the bed. He could not get out of the bed. He felt the covers on him like a thick skin. He had healed by then. It was the first time she spoke to him that way. After she left, he touched himself under the sheets. The silence was hard, horrible.

He had always thought he was a man of action. But they lived enormous lives, lives spread across the possible distance.

She came back.

"If we get married, I'll die," he said. She looked at him with her huge brown eyes, specks of green out of the earth. Her pupils orbited. He thought: It's true. Then the moment of triumph. It's true.

What gave him the idea that they would marry? Rena, meanwhile, knew that she could leave at any time. People are always leaving. Her mother used to tell her father, even after they had been married for twenty years, 'You watch out. One day I'll just pick up and leave'.

Morts joked about her closet full of sweaters, but Rena knew they were meaningless garments woven together by poor women in other countries.

Morts liked the idea of playing hockey more than he actually liked playing hockey. When he talked about getting the boys together to play some hockey, Rena nodded cheerfully and thought: This is our life.

Is it so horrible, to think: This is my life?

Morts was a man who did not know what to do with his body. Rena wondered if she should see someone, just to tell them what she was thinking about. But they didn't believe in that, the two of them. She went to her gynecologist for a regular check-up.

"I'm depressed," she said.

"I am too," her gynecologist said. For some reason, this was a story she felt she could tell Morts. She told him and he was nice to her for the entire weekend.

They lived in a house converted into three apartments. They lived in one of the apartments. It was very quiet when no one was home.

We eat ourselves up, Rena thought, looking at him that time when all he could do was drool. We have our real lives inside us. We feed our bodies to our real lives.

"Will we still fuck when we're eighty?" Mort said. The restaurant around them like a dream. He gulped from a bottle of beer. "The thing is," he said, "is that I don't want to be buried next to you. I don't know why. I just don't."

One day Rena quit her job. She went to her locker and took out the shoes she wore to do her job and put them in her back-pack. She didn't really quit her job, that is, she didn't tell anyone. She just left, she just picked up and left.