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What I’d like is not to make rigorous, manly, night-ending love now or in two minutes, but to have already done so; to have it on my record as a deed performed and well, and to have a lank, friendly, guard-down love’s afterease be ours; me to be the goodly swain who somehow rescues an evening from the shallows of nullity — what I suffered before my nap and which it’s been my magician’s trick to save us from over these months, by arriving always brimming with good ideas (much as I try to do with Paul or anybody), setting in motion day trips to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, a canoe ride on the Batsto, a weekend junket to the Gettysburg battlefield, capped off by a balloon trip Sally was game for but not me. Not to mention a three-day Vermont color tour last fall that didn’t work out, since we spent most of two days stuck in a cavalcade of slow-moving leaf-peepers in tour buses and Winnebagos, plus the prices were jacked up, the beds too small and the food terrible. (We ended up driving back one night early, feeling old and tired — Sally slept most of the way — and in no mood even to suffer a drink together when I let her off at the foot of Asbury Street.)

“I made bow ties,” Sally says very assuredly, after the long silence occasioned by my unwanted kiss, during which we both realized we are not about to head upstairs for any fun. “That’s your favorite, correct? Farfalline

“It’s sure the food I most like to see” I say.

She smiles around again, stretches her long legs out until her ankles make smart little pops. “I’m coming apart at my seams, so it seems,” she says. In fact, she’s an aggressive tennis player who hates to lose and, in spite of her one leg being docked, can scissor the daylights out of a grown man.

“Are you over there thinking about Wally?” I say, for no good reason except I thought it.

“Wally Caldwell?” She says this as if the name were new to her.

“It was just something I thought. From my distance here.”

“The name alone survives,” she says. “Too long ago.” I don’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “I had to give up on that name. He left me, and his children. So.” She shakes her thick blond hair as if the specter of Weasel Wally were right out in the dark, seeking admission to our conversation, and she’d rejected him. “What I was thinking about — because when I drove all the way to New York today to pick up some tickets, I was also thinking it then — was you, and about you being here when I came home, and what we’d do, and just what a sweet man you always are.”

This is not a good harbinger, mark my words.

“I want to be a sweet man,” I say, hoping this will have the effect of stopping whatever she is about to say next. Only in rock-solid marriages can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a “but” following along afterward like a displeasing goat. In many ways a rock-solid marriage has a lot to say for itself. “But what?”

“But nothing. That’s all.” Sally hugs her knees, her long bare feet side by side on the front edge of her rocker seat, her long body swaying forward and back. “Does there have to be a ‘but’?”

“Maybe that’s what I am.” I should make a goat noise.

“A butt? Well. I was just driving along thinking I liked you. That’s all. I can try to be harder to get along with.”

“I’m pretty happy with you,” I say. An odd little smirky smile etches along my silly mouth and hardens back up into my cheeks without my willing it.

Sally turns all the way sideways and peers up at me in the gloom of the porch. A straight address. “Well, good.”

I say nothing, just smirk.

“Why are you smiling like that?” she says. “You look strange.”

“I don’t really know,” I say, and poke my finger in my cheek and push, which makes the sturdy little smile retreat back into my regular citizen’s mien.

Sally squints at me as if she’s able to visualize something hidden in my face, something she’s never seen but wants to verify because she always suspected it was there.

“I always think about the Fourth of July as if I needed to have something accomplished by now, or decided,” she says. “Maybe that was one of my problems last night. It’s from going to school in the summers for so long. The fall just seems too late. I don’t even know late for what.”

I, though, am thinking about a more successful color tour. Michigan: Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix. A weekend on Mackinaw Island, riding a tandem. (All things, of course, I did with Ann. Nothing’s new.)

Sally raises both her arms above her head, joins hands and does a slinky yoga stretch, getting the kinks out of everything and causing her bracelets to slide up her arm in a jangly little cascade. This pace of things, this occasional lapse into silence, this unurgency or ruminance, is near the heart of some matter with us now. I wish it would vamoose. “I’m boring you,” she says, arms aloft, luminous. She’s nobody’s pushover and a wonderful sight to see. A smart man should find a way to love her.

“You’re not boring me,” I say, feeling for some reason elated. (Possibly the leading edge of a cool front has passed, and everybody on the seaboard just felt better all at once.) “I don’t mind it that you like me. I think it’s great.” Possibly I should kiss her again. A real one.

“You see other women, don’t you?” she says, and begins to shuffle her feet into a pair of flat gold sandals.

“Not really.”

“What’s ‘not really’?” She picks her wine glass up off the floor. A mosquito is buzzing my ear. I’m more than ready to head inside and forget this topic.

“I don’t. That’s all. I guess if somebody came along who I wanted to see”—“see”: a word I hate; I’m happier with “boff” or “boink,” “roger” or “diddle”—“then I feel like that’d be okay. With me, I mean.”

“Right,” Sally says curtly.

Whatever spirit has moved her to put her sandals on has passed now. I hear her take a deep breath, wait, then let it slowly out. She is holding her glass by its smooth round base.

“I think you see other men,” I say hopefully. Cuff links come to mind.

“Of course.” She nods, staring over the porch banister toward small yellow dots embedded in darkness at an incomprehensible distance. I think again of us Divorced Men, huddled for safety’s sake on our bestilled vessel, staring longingly at the mysterious land (possibly at this very house), imagining lives, parties, cool restaurants, late-night carryings-on we ached to be in on. Any one of us would’ve swum ashore against the flood to do what I’m doing. “I have this odd feeling about seeing other men,” Sally says meticulously. “That I do it but I’m not planning anything.” To my huge surprise, though I’m not certain, I think she scoops a tear from the corner of her eye and massages it dry between her fingers. This is why we are staying on the porch. I of course didn’t know she was actually “seeing” other men.

“What would you like to be waiting on?” I say, too earnestly.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She sniffs to signify I needn’t worry about further tears. “Waiting’s just a bad habit. I’ve done it before. Nothing, I guess.” She runs her fingers back through her thick hair, gives her head a tiny clearing shake. I’d like to ask about the anchor, ball and chain, but this is not the moment, since all I’d do is find out. “Do you think you’re waiting for something to happen?” She looks up at me again, skeptically. Whatever my answer, she’s expecting it to be annoying or deceitful or possibly stupid.

“No,” I say, an attempt at frankness — something I probably can’t bring off right now. “I don’t know what it’d be for either.”