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Chris thought now, watching as her husband inched forward on the bed, his hand grazing the damp skin of her legs, sending a current, like a wayward electrical charge, racing toward her heart. Up close, Tony was smaller, more compact, than he first appeared, barely five feet eight inches tall, although he was more muscular than his narrow shoulders would indicate. He was wearing jeans and the moss green sweater she’d bought him for his last birthday, the soft color of the wool underlining the harsher green of his eyes. His hair was thick and brown, except for a small patch of white near his right temple. Tony told everyone the patch was the result of a childhood trauma, although the precise trauma tended to shift with each telling, as did his explanation for the scar that scissored through his flesh from the base of his left ear to the curve of his jaw. Over the eleven years of their marriage, Chris had heard so many versions of how he got that scar that she was no longer able to recall whether it was the result of a near-fatal childhood fall, a death-defying car crash, or a barroom brawl. The answer, she was sure, was something infinitely moreprosaic than any of these alternatives, although she would never think of questioning Tony’s story. Tony had a need for the dramatic. He exaggerated life’s mundane details, enlarged the ordinary, enhanced the everyday. It was part of his charm, part of what drove him, made him so creative. You couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing one of his ads; you couldn’t walk a city block without seeing a billboard he’d designed. The “Cat’s Meow” campaign for VIP Cat Food, the “Really Cheese Them Off” campaign for Dairyvale cheeses, both were his. Hadn’t he been promoted to senior art director faster than anyone else in the history of Warsh, Rubican? And wasn’t this natural flair for hyperbole at least part of what had attracted her to him in the first place? In those early years, Tony had made everything seem so exciting, so limitless, so
possible
.
    Chris smiled, all the encouragement he needed. She watched him immediately move forward on the bed. Tony lifted the tray, laid it gently on the floor, took her hands in his.
    “Tony …”
    “It’ll never happen again, Chris. I promise.”
    “It can’t.”
    “It won’t.”
    “You scared me.”
    “I scared myself,” he agreed. “I heard this voice yelling. I couldn’t believe it was me. The awful things I was saying.…”
    “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
    “I know. Please forgive me.”
    Could she? Chris wondered. Could she forgive him? “Maybe we should go for counseling.” Chrisheld her breath, braced herself for the outrage she was sure would follow. Hadn’t Tony made his opinion of marriage counselors painfully clear? Hadn’t he told her that there was no way he would ever allow some overeducated quack to interfere in his private life?
    “Counseling won’t help,” he said quietly.
    “It might. We could at least give it a try. Whatever problems we’re having—”
    “I got fired.”
    “What!” Chris was sure she’d heard him incorrectly. “What are you talking about?”
    “They let me go,” he said without further elaboration.
    Chris saw the words bouncing around in front of her eyes, like the errant particles of dust hanging in the sunlight, and tried to grab hold of them, get them to stay still long enough for her to understand their implications, but they refused to be so easily corralled. “They let you go?” she repeated helplessly, the words making no more sense for her having said them out loud. “Why?”
    Tony shrugged. “Dan Warsh said something about the need for fresh perspectives, new ideas.”
    “But they’ve always loved your ideas. The ‘Cat’s Meow,’ the ‘Really Cheese Them Off’ campaigns, I thought they loved those.”
    “They did-last year. This is 1982, Chris. We’re in the middle of a major recession. Everyone’s running