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want to know another thing I’m glad about?”
    He glanced up from his plate and smiled. “Do you actually want a yes or no?”
    “Of course not. I’m glad that you don’t wear those stiff, baggy science-guy jeans that look like they were put in a charity bin and sent to some third world country where they said, ‘Ugh!’ and sent them right back.”
    As our dialogue indicated, Adam was closer to being a word minimalist and I was pretty much a maximalist. Still, when it came to thinking, I didn’t know whether long and complex thoughts whizzed through his brain or if he was particularly gifted in the hunch department. But he did sense I was still upset about Lisa because he asked, “Did that woman you knew from the CIA get back to you?”
    “No.”
    “She sounds like a pain in the butt.”
    “She was.”
    “Sounds like she still is. Well, she probably realized you couldn’t do anything about… what was it? A matter of national importance.” This remark was so you-doing-something-nationally-important-ha-ha! it brought to mind that breakfast table scene from The Public Enemy in which James Cagney smushes a grapefruit into his mistress’s face. Not that I could imagine doing something like that to Adam, plus the only citrus fruit I had on hand was a lemon, which was in the refrigerator and I would have to cut it in half. Besides, even during our worst moments, my attacks on him tended more toward the oblique: Your mother is a closet anti-Semite and don’t deny it because every time we visit, her first dinner is always that greasy roast pork with bacon and chard, though during one fight I threw his shaving mug across the bathroom. Actual belligerence was rare.
    Most of the time, actually, we were more like the two demoiselle cranes that lived in the pond right next to the Bronx Zoo’s hospital, where Adam worked. They were gray birds, a little smaller than regular cranes, with black on the front of their necks that extended down over their chests like chic, oblong black scarves. Not only did they mate for life, but they always seemed to do things together.
    Each time I visited Adam at work, he’d point them out. “When one crane drinks,” he’d tell me, “the other one always seems to be drinking too!” His hands would be on my shoulders so he could position me for a perfect crane panorama. Then, for the fifth or twenty-fifth time, he’d go on about their monogamous nature (human marriage, alas, being an institution in which you listen to the same observations limitless times, which would reduce mere cranes to insane philandering). “Amazing!”
    Actually, Adam did not speak with exclamation points, being your standard low-key Western guy, but I was pretty good at discovering the occasional maraschino cherry of emotion in his vanilla delivery. In any case, my husband was a one-woman man, and since the day he’d picked me up inside the Small Mammal House at the National Zoo in Washington, where he claimed I was smiling at a red-ruffed lemur, I’d been his woman.
    And I stood by my man, albeit not while he was doing a necropsy — that’s what an autopsy for animals is called—on, say, a deer he suspected might have succumbed to meningitis. Still, I was a traditional wife, delighted to sit beside him on the couch watching 24, or to go along for an hour-long evening trot with our dogs, even listen to the old country music records he’d inherited from his grandfather—scratchy, mournful songs sung by a hoarse cowpoke who sounded as if he should get a chest X-ray.
    “Why should you care if she doesn’t call back?” Adam said. He eyeballed his sunny-side-up egg and expertly cut it so that not only did the yolk not run, but the piece fit perfectly atop his toast triangle. In vet school, his professors said he’d make a brilliant surgeon.
    “I don’t know,” I muttered, trying to think of some topic that would make him believe I wasn’t trying to avoid talking about Lisa. I sliced a humongous