In that long hour after dinner and before the crickets, on the deck (a ten-year-old addition that still feels new) overlooking the vast and verdant backyard, the doctor’s wife delivers the punchline as usual (it is hardly the first time she has told this anecdote), preceded by a pause and two syllables of laughter, immediately followed by a scan of the three other faces around the table (over which is draped a white tablecloth that some thrifty guest had given on her wedding day sixteen years prior [all that remains of the wedding is a blur of tuxedos and smiles and thank yous and the feeling, magnified by retrospection, that life would be a much different and more difficult habit from then on (though there are other things also, rarely recalled as they fade into oblivion, like the way her husband held her during that first dance, both of them smiling, delirious and stunned at what they had blindly embarked upon [though they had not felt blind then])] which had not been unblemished when set down six hours earlier but which now is stained here with red wine and there with steak sauce), all familiar and each a trigger for memories that evoked certain emotional, intellectual, and instinctual responses in her though these were (relatively) rarely examined in much detail because who has time for that (who could ever have enough time, for example, as her gaze skimmed over her husband’s best friend, to fully reflect on the thirteen post-nuptial sexual encounters one has had with that man, the gentle violence in the dark, the sudden distance as they dressed, and the marvelously improbable secrecy in which it had all transpired, known to them and them alone [as secret holders tend to think] and bound to be forgotten once they are both dead, or both beyond memory, whichever comes first; how could she have time for all that when there is barely enough to observe whether his present laughter at her anecdote is genuine or feigned) and with the anecdote told and the laughter precipitated she is hit by a cold moment of self-awareness (hardly the first or last) in which she sees very clearly that she is a woman whose life is more than half over and still a bewilderment, that the words coming out of her mouth are meaningless sounds, manipulations of lips and tongue in the arena of mouth and teeth, that when she dies nothing in the world will stop except her thoughts (or maybe not, maybe they won’t stop, but she won’t be around to hear them anymore), that every other person at the table was in more or less the same boat and how ridiculous it was that they understood and reacted to each other’s sounds.

All of this hits her at once but she does not stop smiling. The slightest lapse in decorum would never [sic] be forgotten by these people, friend and husband and lover, and she does not want anyone to think she is unhappy. Unthinkingly she lowers her eyes (still smiling) to the prandial detritus on her plate (flank steak she prepared herself with less than perfect results though no one would ever say so) and raised her glass of wine to take a sip, bigger than intended.

“That is something,” says Rebecca, wife of Larry, mother of two.

The doctor’s wife rolls her eyes in acknowledgment. With her left hand she finds the right hand of her husband, who reclines in his chair, his plate clean and his belly bulging despite the twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week (he has felt his body slacken over the years, grow looser and heavier even as his mind has wound itself tighter [every syllable his wife has uttered tonight (and how well he knows her cadences and melodies) has been another turn of the screw] and has reached a point where to exercise or not to exercise seems a decision of minor consequence). He looks not at his wife but across the backyard to the horizon, where the sun has only just vanished, survived by its light in the darkening sky. There is the first star, alone. He returns his wife’s squeeze with one of his own, briefer and equally unthinking. On his lips a faint smile. He has heard the anecdote several times before and neither it nor his wife’s manner of relating it has ever amused him. “Well, it could have happened to anyone,” his wife says to Rebecca, and abruptly, to his wife’s surprise and, incidentally, concomitant to the withdrawal of her hand, he laughs, long and loud.