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Barbie-blond hair. There was a long maunder about solvents, which Brian put an end to by lopping off the lock with a carving knife, and Louise got a little upset. But that was the single set-piece commotion, and otherwise no one drank too much or took offense; their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice—nice, nice, nice .
    I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. Why would I have preferred a fight? Weren’t those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought? Wasn’t I married to a man I loved, so why did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt when I helped him bring in bowls of Häagen-Dazs from the kitchen? In retrospect, I was quite right to kick myself, too. Just a few years later I’d have paid money for an ordinary, good-spirited family gathering during which the worst thing any of the children got up to was sticking gum in their hair.
    You, however, announced boisterously in the lobby, “That was great. I think they’re both terrific. We should be sure to have them over soon, if they can get a sitter.”
    I held my tongue. You would have no time for my nit-picking about how wasn’t the luncheon a little bland, didn’t you have this feeling like, what’s the point, isn’t there something flat and plain and doughy about this whole Father Knows Best routine when Brian was once (at last I can admit to a guest-room quickie at a party before you and I met) such a hell-raiser. It’s quite possible that you felt exactly as I did, that this to all appearances successful encounter had felt dumpy and insipid to you as well, but in lieu of another obvious model to aspire to—we were not going to go score a gram of cocaine—you took refuge in denial. These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time . To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnamable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.
    You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turn up their noses at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks—what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.
    As we spun through the revolving doors onto Riverside Drive, I’m sure my disquiet was unformed and fleeting. Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be —your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.
    I proposed that we walk home. On the road for Wing and a Prayer I walked everywhere, and the impulse was second nature.
    “It must be six or seven miles to Tribeca!” you objected.
    “You’ll take a taxi in order to jump rope 7,500 times in front of the Knicks game, but a vigorous walk that gets you where you’re going is too exhausting.”
    “Hell, yes. Everything in its place.” Limited to exercise or