“Sounds like a pretty fun childhood, but it doesn’t sound like much of a marriage.”

Marcus was seated next to her on the couch in his small living room on a Saturday afternoon. In the few months they’d been together, they’d made this one-bedroom, one-bath apartment their sanctuary. She had changes of clothes in a drawer in the bedroom dresser and in half the space in the small bedroom closet. When she complained that there were no window coverings, he asked her to choose some. The following Saturday afternoon, they hung sheer yellow curtains over the two corner windows in the bedroom and the larger window in the living room. His Bass Ale stood next to her Amstel Light on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Odds and ends of leftovers, a loaf of wheat bread, packaged sandwich makings, a quart of milk, and a few condiments made up the rest of their stash.

On this Saturday, once again she was tucked into her corner the couch, her feet pulled up against her butt, a pack of Salems on the cushion beside her. Piles of his writer’s notes from the previous week littered the small table in the corner and spilled off onto the area rug he’d salvaged from his bedroom in Atwater Village. A tall rack of CDs rose beside the amplifier and changer stacked next to the small table. John Williams’ guitar inventions of Bach suites, which she’d brought from her room at her mothers, lent out-of-place elegance behind their conversation.

“It’s like they lived in different worlds,” he wrinkled his forehead, searching, “and you had to make these regular border crossings from the museum to the golf club, from the Community Center to the Yacht Club, from Jewish to Gentile.”

“Pretty much,” she answered, her tone void of feeling. She lit a cigarette. “How’s that for a confusing childhood? I had a therapist off and on while I was growing up, and I spent quite a bit of time with her trying to figure out why they ever got married.”

“What do you think?”

“The best I came up with, that still works for me, is that they each had their own money and social standing, so, as my therapist pointed out, neither was dependent upon the other. It helped that they actually enjoyed one another’s company. With money, education, and their liberal common interests, they were pretty compatible.”

She straightened her legs and reached to the small coffee table in front of the couch, snuffed out the end of her cigarette, then lit another. Tucked again into her corner of the couch, she continued.

“They didn’t have to mingle much in public except at fundraisers and at cocktail parties with important people. I saw my dad mostly on the weekends. He was gone for work before I got up in the morning and wasn’t home till after I was asleep. On Sunday nights we’d go to his mother’s house for dinner. I don’t think she liked my mom much, maybe because she was a Jew and not a Catholic. But she was kind to me, and in my little-girl way, I loved her.”

She made a quick visit to her memories of Charlotte Blain, nodded, and said, “I still do. She’d read me stories from the same children’s books she’d read to my dad, all in mint condition on a low shelf in her paneled library. Even now when I visit in San Francisco, after dinner with Dad and Colleen I make my way to the library. I sit on the floor and thumb through those books, hunting for something I left there when I was a little girl. Often, she’ll find me and sit in the large chair. I’ll read out loud half a page that we both still know from memory.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live. But every time Mr. Mallard saw what looked like a nice place, Mrs. Mallard said it was no good.”

“Then she joins in to finish the paragraph: There were sure to be foxes in the woods or turtles in the water, and she was not going to raise a family where there might be foxes or turtles. I don’t think of her very often unless I’m in San Francisco, but I do love her Since the divorce and since I moved away, I know she misses me.”

She took a deep breath. “Still loves me.”

“So to get back to their marriage,” Marcus shied away from her tenderness, “some pieces of it worked pretty well.”

Delia dragged on her Salem, blew smoke at Marcus, and gave up her grin. She tapped out the butt of her cigarette. Weak afternoon sunlight pressed through the curtains, barely lighting the room, matching the mood of the Bach suites. Delia put both hands behind her head, closed her eyes, and said in that voice without feeling, “It worked until it didn’t.”

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