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Darwin the way hedge fund managers believe in the market. He said we need a group for protection, for efficient food production, for survival. We are not single predators, we are not fish that mate without touching. Right now I think I am more fish than mammal.
    I watch television without caring if the victim is avenged, if the murderer is caught, if the good doctor gets the woman of his dreams, if the serial killer gives himself up. H. could fall asleep watching television. Perhaps the drama in his office was sufficient. I always had to wait until the plot’s resolution. I had to sit through the commercials because I needed to know how the story ended. Now I don’t care anymore. This is not good but I have no idea how to bring back my appetite for story, my connection to the people in my life. Perhaps time will restore me, perhaps it won’t.
    H. read every Trollope novel at least four times. He had his favorite heroines. Lady Glencora, Jane, Elizabeth. He was fond of the Pallisers one and all. When we married, his prize possession, not trusted to the movers but carried in his arms to our new home, was an old, brown-leather, yellow-paged 1894 edition of the Trollope novels that spread out across two bookshelves. He read and reread George Elliot. Sometimes when we were riding a distance in the car he would tell me the plot of Daniel Deronda in all its detail. It didn’t matter to him that I knew the story, had read the

    book. He liked telling it to me. I liked listening. Again and again he read Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the sea battles between the French and the English. His favorite character, Doctor Maturin, was a spy, an adventurer, a sailor, to whom he was particularly attached. If in my imagination I bore a certain lifetime resemblance to Nancy Drew, then he was Maturin, physician to the captain of the ship.
    Born to immigrants in Brooklyn’s Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush, H. attended movies every Saturday afternoon, where he learned to speak without the Yiddish inf lection of his parents or the Brooklyn accent of his neighbors. He told me that at a Saturday matinee double feature in 1936 he won a raff le and brought home a box of brand-new blue-and-white porcelain dishes to his mother.
    It is amazing that the nineteenth-century world of English gentry could so hold his attention. He would not be pleased at my current disaffection from stories. He would be impatient with my wet mood. I assume he would understand that my mind is restricted in its play for good reasons. But he would not want such a condition to become permanent.

    • • •

    I once had a long-widowed friend who said that she loved her bed and her television and her kitchen and she felt well only inside her apartment. I thought this was sad, I thought that she had retreated too soon. But now I understand this better. It is becoming true for me too. The familiar forms a cocoon around me, asks nothing of me, provides me with a space to let my mind roam where it will. I am less anxious inside than out, less vulnerable, less apt to wonder what will

    become of me. I understand that at a certain age there has been enough adventuring, enough sailing forth. It seems right to curl up like a sick cat on a pillow and wait for the end. I see this and I fear this.
    “Yes,” said Molly Bloom. “Yes,” say I. If anyone asks.
    Although I have my doubts.

    • • •

    I go to a Sunday-night dinner—it’s not just a dinner. For many years H. and I have gone to this house and watched the Giants football games with other fans and spouses. We have a betting pool. Each of us writes on a small card the name of the winner, and by how much. It costs ten dollars to enter. The cards sit in a large glass bowl in the center of the dining table. H., child of the Great Depression, hated to lose the ten dollars but was willing. Sometimes we held the dinner at our house. Often H. and I watched the Giants in our bedroom. He, covering his eyes when the other team