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Another odd happening is that Paul is cooking up a storm.

Though I'm not complaining here. I never knew him to be a cook, at least not a fancy one. He could always throw together a decent pasta dish or some baked stuffed trout when I once visited them out in their ever-misty coastal Oregon town, but his tastes and skills have evolved impressively in these past few years he's been in the academic world with Theresa (lots of free time, enough money, discerning, always ravenous colleagues).

Theresa, I should mention, has been eating like a grizzly bear during a salmon spawn, being absolutely insatiable whenever she's awake, though lately her hunger seems to have subsided.

This is the one clue that makes me think she's all right, and so okay to be doing what they're doing. Each morning after a huge breakfast of oatmeal and eggs and fruit and pastries, she and Paul will roll out the Ferrari (why the hell not, as I don't like to drive it anyway; the sitting position is a bit too squat for my longish legs and it revs too hotly such that I can't make it do anything but jerk forward in ten-yard bursts) and lay down that fourteen-inch-wide rubber around the county in search of or-ganic meats and vegetables and craft cheeses and breads, foodstuffs Eunice of course has FedExed in daily but that I had no idea could be had out here in Super Shopper land, where there are always nine brands of hot dogs available but only one kind of lettuce (guess which). They only buy what we'll be eating that evening, which works out because the Testarossa doesn't have any trunk space to speak of, only a tiny nook behind the two seats (which, by the way, is just enough room for a couple of tennis racquets). My sole complaint is the might-as-well-eat-at-a-restaurant cost of the supplies, not to mention the premium gasoline they're burning at the rate of a gallon every seven miles, but once you've had seared foie gras with caramelized-shallot-and-Calvados-glace, or wild salmon tartare on homemade wasabi Ry-Krisps, and eaten it right at your own dreary suburban kitchen table where you've probably opened more bottles of ketchup than imported beer, you happily fan out the fresh twenties each morning and utter nary a word, counting yourself lucky that you can tag along, and in an odd way I feel as if we three are moving quite fast through the world, consuming whatever we can.

And yet the trouble pools on our plates. The other morning, while sitting at the kitchen table, with Theresa sleeping in, Paul at the counter mixing a whole-grain batter for pancakes with raspberries, I let down my mug with enough oomph to make the coffee splash up and over onto my Newsday, to which Paul said, "Just another minute, Jerry."

"It's not about the chow," I said.

Paul pretended not to hear me, decanting the oil into the skillet and lighting the burner beneath it.

Since they've moved in and Paul's been cooking with high heat like a pro, the house gets heavy with a savory smoke that makes me think Rita's been around, a redolence all the more dear and confusing and depressing at present, as she's not returned any of my phone messages since the brunch at Richie's two weeks ago. Maybe a guy like me has to figure he's got just a couple chances in this life for full-on love with a woman he's respected every bit as much as physically desired, and if I've really squandered my allotment I probably ought to be hauled off to the woods in back and shot in the name of every woman who was surely meant to enjoy more loving than she got but didn't, mostly because of some yea-saying bobblehead, who semi-tried as hard as he could but always came up short.

"Look, Paul," I said, "it's time to start clueing me in."

"I agree," he answered, carefully ladling in three pancakes.

He put a ramekin of maple syrup in the above-range microwave to warm. "But you know, Jerry, I really don't know anything either."

"Gimme a break, huh?"

"I'm not kidding you," he said.

"Now you're pissing me off."

"Well that's goddamn tough," he said, bang-banging his ladle against the edge of the mixing bowl. The microwave stopped beeping and he popped the door button too hard and it flung open, hitting him in the face. He plucked out the syrup and slammed the door, which popped back out, and so he slammed it again. For a second I thought he might come over and jump me, as I could see him gripping and regripping the spatula; and to tell you the truth I would have been fine with it, not because I wanted a fight but simply to initiate something. I thought maybe his plonking me might loosen the clamps of all this goddamn Eastern restraint ratcheting in on us, which is no doubt an easy lazy pleasure to abide most of the time but is, of late, becoming a kind of torture to me.

But he didn't jump me, and I said, "You must have talked to the doctor, at least."

"Of course I have. A dozen times. But she's only telling me what Theresa allows her to."

"But you're her fiance! It's your baby. This definitely can't be ethical, or Hippocratical, or whatever."

"It's Theresa's call, Jerry, whether I like it or not."

"Well, you can't just sit by. Don't you have rights?"

"What would you have me do, take her to court?"

"Maybe. You could sue her, over her treatment decisions. Or maybe I should do that. You could just threaten to leave her."

"She'd know I was just bluffing," he said. He flipped the pancakes, one by one by one. "Or else she might turn around and leave me."

I didn't answer, because it occurred to me that Theresa could very well do that, if only temporarily. When she was a teenager she only had one boyfriend (that I can remember), a lanky, melancholic, semi-creepy kid who wore a black scarf no matter the weather and wrote science-fictional love poems to her, a few of which I found in the pockets of my old letterman's jacket (which she liked to wear with the sleeves pushed up); for whatever inexplicable reason she was madly in love with the kid, as she'd spontaneously burst into tears at the mere mention of him, regularly enough that before I could even say anything she herself began refusing his phone calls, and because of nothing he did, which made her even more miserable for a while (and him as well, the poor goth neuralgic), but soon enough she'd cured herself of the crying jags and they went steady until she dropped him, she told me later, because she was really tiring of

"his work."

"You know what the doctor finally said to me when I talked to her on Friday?" Paul said, handing me my plate of flapjacks, syrup on the side. "Theresa and I had a bad little fight, so after she went to take a nap, I called. They wouldn't put me through but I pretty much freaked out and the doctor came on. So I gave her a whole speech about responsibility and the benefits of shared knowledge but it was like she didn't hear a word."

"Some lady doctors, you know. ."

"Well, whatever it was. She didn't have time to talk, so she just said that perhaps I ought to consider getting us to couples therapy, if our 'communication levels' weren't where they should be."

"What a superbitch! I hope you told her off."

"Unfortunately, I did. I told her she could go fuck herself."

"Really?"

"I shouldn't have."

"Good for you!"

"It was stupid. She's our doctor. But you know what, Jerry?