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quite what he wanted, not as long or as deep as he felt befitted a dried-out man coming home to a ransacked castle: just the taste of a kiss, a vague and disheartening promise. When he lungedfor more, she’d slip from his path, fasten onto his elbow, and guide him through the morning’s progress to whatever project she’d singled out as his.
    Sweating copiously in the summer heat, closed in by membranous plastic drop cloths, inhaling paint and varnish and lacquer fumes, he puttied and slapped on latex with furious energy. Renovation! Restoration! Preservation! He worked without pause, through what was rightfully the cocktail hour, and prayed to the forces of parallel development that somehow his home and soul and family would come back into shape. When Yvette finally called him to dinner those nights, he was crazed with hunger: ten thousand little mouths sagged open in his veins. She cooked out on the porch using an hibachi and Coleman camp stove, and it seemed to Red that the steaks and canned baked beans and sliced tomatoes could taste so good only to a starving man.
    At one time, when they were first married, Yvette used to say Red was the only man she’d ever met to make intelligent use of alcohol. “It brings out the poet in him.” Hah! That was before she saw him pass out and crack his head open on the glass coffee table. Before he slugged her on the ear. Before he ruined the new linen wallpaper in the Filbert Street dining room with an attack of projectile vomiting. Before he began disappearing for three or five days at a stretch. Really, Red was grateful for his twentieth or thirtieth second chance, and he forgave Yvette even if her crispness had turned brittle, if her generosity was now grudging. He forgave her for being unforgiving. Just wait: he’d make it up to her, turn it all back around.
    During the twilights, they took walks in the groves, an ostensible family. Joe raced circles around them, threw fruit, dug into anthills. Red concentrated only on the flex of distance between Yvette and himself. He took her hand and worried over her reciprocal grip. He did battle with an unceasing urge to drag her to him. Even outside, with miles of room, she could make him feel as if he were crowding her. He felt huge as a haystack, a plow horse, a dump truck—stupidly huge. When she sprang from his side to join Joe, he stood bereft until she returned.
    They slept in the spacious parlor of the house on a foam pad with sheets. When he reached for her, she collapsed against his chest obediently, a well-oiled folding chair. This was not the grab and gasp offirst love, or even the friendly exchange of familiar intimacy; it was, he feared, good sportsmanship. Afterward, when she curled away from him, he would still be wildly awake, restraining himself from reaching out for her again. He hovered over her instead, paw poised, a bear baffled by a tortoise. He monitored the fluttering of her eyelids, the depth of her breath, and calculated how far she fled from him in her dreams.
    Sleep eluded him. With the not drinking, his body was on tilt. He could feel his blood and juices trickling and eddying and sloshing in confusion. He lay wide-eyed and electric for hours on end. He followed the progress of a vigilant moon from frame to frame in the bay window. The house surrounded him, a many-chambered hope.
    In the morning, her capable hands tugged him from sleep, pinched him awake. She’d be dressed, her hair hidden under a scarf, sleeves rolled up, breath steamy from coffee. Time for Home Improvement! Fix It! Do It Yourself! And in the middle of this mad race toward perfection, Red Ray decided to go on a diet: one thousand calories a day.
    When he told Yvette, she grabbed a handful of his abdominal sag. “I won’t object,” she said.
    In the first week, he lost eight pounds. “I set them free,” he told Yvette, “like Prospero released Ariel and all the sprites on the island.” The second week, he lost four more pounds. He