That was about as romantic as Carey got. I remember that the waitress was clearing the table next to ours, making a huge clatter, and I felt like telling her to get lost, but that would have made things worse.

I never got around to applying to Parsons, I guess I was sick of school. I got hired as a pasteup artist at the first place I interviewed, a small advertising agency whose specialty was toy accounts. My first big break came when they gave me a brochure for a new game, something to do with the alphabet and the names of different dinosaurs. I stayed late every night for a week, rifling through everyone’s type books, deconstructing letters into reptilian shapes. The result was a collage that got me promoted out of the pool to assistant designer.

Carey and I lived cozily in one of those rambling university housing apartments between Broadway and Riverside. After dinner, if he didn’t have a night lab, he’d take me into his lap and surprise me with presents from gift shops in the neighborhood, odd and mysterious things, like a bowl made of lava, or brass earrings crafted by an Italian monk.

The sex got better, but what I loved most about Carey, what I missed about him after the divorce, was simply his physical presence. Nights, I’d wait for him. Even if I fell asleep, some part of me would still be waiting, anticipating the dip of the mattress, the heat of his body. I knew this always, even through my dreams.

The second phase of our marriage, what I later thought of as the yuppie phase, was marked by Carey receiving his doctorate and a tenure-track teaching position at Columbia. By that time my agency had expanded and merged with a Madison Avenue one, and I’d been promoted from designer to director. It’s only now that I understand I was throwing myself into my job the way I’d thrown myself into painting at boarding school. I did it in order to numb the monster inside me, the one who wanted to murder Monkey King but instead ended up trying to murder herself.

We moved ten blocks downtown and over to Riverside into a fifteenth-floor co-op. One Saturday I started looking through my old boxes and found brushes and paints, which prompted me to set up a skeleton studio in the spare room that was supposed to be the nursery for our future progeny.

It’s funny how all the big decisions I’d ever made were about escape. Maybe that’s why I was able to make them so quickly—they were all basically the same decision. While Carey was away at a conference I went down to Charlottesville to visit Marty. God knows how she’d ended up there, something to do with an old boyfriend, like all her expeditions. I hung around in the old blues club where she was tending bar, Miss Exotic, the sleek mink in a pen full of mice. “What about your acting?” I asked.

“They let me sing here, sometimes. It’s worth it. It’s experience.” She was smoking a lot, to roughen her voice. Give it character, she said. I remember this: she had an Ace bandage wrapped around her left wrist.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Coffee burn.”

She was lying, but I didn’t call her on it.

I returned to the city, dropped my bags in the living room, and stood there in the dark looking out at our spectacular view: the midnight blue Hudson with the George Washington Bridge stretching jeweled and serene to the north into New Jersey. But when I turned on the light I was surrounded by the oppressive furniture of my life: the dining room table with its six walnut chairs whose flowered upholstery took Carey’s great-aunt twelve years to embroider, an elaborate teak sideboard with baroque scrollwork, ancient pale Oriental rugs, and four extremely ugly table lamps in the shape of bucking horses which Carey adored. The shelves were crammed with textbooks, lab notebooks, and boxes upon boxes of slides my husband had shot of the new kind of bacteria that had been the subject of his thesis. There was not a whisper of me in this room. I might as well have not been living there at all.

I played back the answering machine tape. There was a message from Carey, which I buzzed past. I changed into my painting clothes and went into my studio and started scraping away at an old canvas so I could start again. I was twenty-six years old and I wanted to start again.

Youdon’t know how to give in. You don’t know how to love like a wife has to love.

Maybe Ma had been right.

I came home from work the next day and saw my husband’s suit bag draped over the sofa and his shoes side by side on the carpet, heard the shower running. I sat down in the living room and waited till he was on the way to the bedroom, towel wrapped around his waist.

“Christ! I didn’t hear you come in.” He padded toward me making wet footprints, and I thought he looked just like a dog, all brown-eyed and hopeful.

“We have to talk,” I said.

“Okay, okay, let me put on a robe and my glasses. Did you get my message?”

“Uh-uh.” He looked perplexed and then went to the bedroom while I steeled myself. When he came back I said, “I think we should try living separately for a while.”

He looked absolutely floored and I felt cruel but continued. “I’ve been thinking things over. I’m not happy, Carey. I don’t know whether it’s us or what. I think I need some time away so I can think things out.”

“Sally. Dear.” That was his only endearment, and a rare one. He sat down on the sofa beside me. “Being alone is going to let you think more clearly? I don’t understand that.”

“Well, it’s true. Maybe not for you, but for me.”

“We can see a marriage counselor. There’s no need for hasty decisions.”

“We can see a counselor, but I still want my own apartment. I just need to be by myself for a while. Is that so much to ask?”

“Look, I told you anytime you want, you can just quit working. Don’t you want a baby? I thought you wanted a baby.”

He sounded simpleminded. I gripped my hands into fists. “I’m not talking about ending anything, Carey. I’m talking about a break.”

My husband looked down at the floor, noticed that his wing tips were out of alignment, straightened them, and then said, “Okay, Sally. If that’s what you really want. We’ll try it. How long were you thinking of?”

“Six months.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Do you think you can find a place to rent for six months?”

“I don’t mind breaking a lease.”

“You’re sure of this now?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” He was being so reasonable I wanted to scream, pick up one of his damn shoes, hurl it across the room, and shatter a horse lamp. But I didn’t. We just sat there in silence for a while and then he leaned over and said softly: “Sally.” My stomach clenched.

“How can you want that now?” I asked him. “How can you even think it?”

“If we’re going to be living apart—”

“No,” I said. And it was as simple as that.

I was happy, at first. I went out with people in my office, who said, “God, Sally, we always thought of you as such the perfect little wife, and now here you are acting crazy like the rest of us.” I played pool, started wearing my skirts a little shorter, but not too short. I was not the one with great legs. Ma called every night. Carey had been talking to her, he was such a responsible, generous husband, he loved me so much. After I hung up with Ma, I’d call Fran. “I feel so free,” I said.

“Then stay free.”

“I want rapture.”

“Then hold out for it, honey.”

My husband did not let me alone. He sent me roses, took me out to every new restaurant that opened in town. It was the courtship we’d never had. I gained weight, from those dinners and from all the beer I was drinking on pool nights. Carey said I looked terrific. “Could you be, maybe you’re. . .?” he asked me once.

“I’m not pregnant,” I told him.

Six months turned into eight. Neither of us had done anything about counseling.