She slid under the covers, easing him over with her body. He stood up, and then, as soon as she was still, he lay down again and settled himself against the rise of her hips under the covers. Slowly she felt his warmth radiate through the quilt. She reached over with her left hand and stroked him for a moment, feeling the way his body lifted slightly, the way it tensed in pleasure under her touch.

She was wide awake. She was trying to resurrect her dream, and couldn’t. She just knew that Graham had been there, his enveloping, reassuring presence—and the same sense of joy she’d felt earlier in the day came to her again, a kind of peace descending on her. It was as though some part of her that had been missing had been returned.

She remembered so many things, things it seemed she’d forgotten. Things she must have willed herself to forget in her anger at him. The first time they’d made love—that wonderfully easy, slippery night when she’d walked him home from the bookstore. That he’d half carried, half danced her into his bedroom, his hand moving up under her skirt, his fingers finding her already, sliding into her already. That he’d gotten up hours later at a pause in things to go to the bathroom, and that on his return, he’d danced naked in the half-light of the room, his penis flopping as he leapt, his big body turning this way and that, as if he were offering it to her in this preposterous way. She remembered that she’d been embarrassed on his behalf at first, but then, slowly, amused, delighted. Later she’d thought that he was perhaps getting out ahead of the possibility of her finding him ridiculous by being ridiculous.

“Everybody loves a fat penis,” he had said after he’d taken a deep theatrical bow and come back to bed. “Why not love the fat man who carries it around?”

Why not?

She had loved his fat penis, the way it filled her, how much she could feel it inside her. And she had loved him, the fat man—she had come to love even that about him—his bulk, his flesh. The touch of his beard, of his mouth on her body everywhere. How the talking in the dark—it didn’t matter what about, just the passing of the words, the ideas, the jokes, back and forth—was part of all of it. She remembered his voice, whispering so as not to wake Sarah, but still somehow deep, rumbling. She remembered his laughing so hard once that he had to get out of bed and pace around the room to try to catch his breath.

All this, all this returned to her. Because of her fall. Because she’d gone to hear Ian read. Because of the chairs, the missing chairs that had made her think of Graham, made her remember that night with him.

Why had she gone to hear Ian, really?

Because of Graham. Because she’d still been angry at him—angry at him on account of Rosemary. Because, as she’d come to see, Ian—wanting the disturbance of Ian—had been, now just as much as when she was at MacDowell, a way of making up for something that had gone wrong between her and Graham.

She remembered again what she’d written to Gertie about Ian—so proudly. That nothing had happened. That he didn’t matter, that it didn’t matter.

But of course the truth was that she had wanted something to happen with him at MacDowell. She had wanted him. But not enough, apparently.

Had she been frightened? Was that it? Or was it just Graham, finally? Her sureness that in the end he was what she wanted.

Some of both, perhaps. In any case, she hadn’t let it happen. They’d done that ridiculous thing instead. At the thought of it, she stirred uncomfortably and the cat once more had to readjust himself.

It seemed to her, lying there, that some of what she’d felt for Graham after the discovery of Rosemary was envy. Maybe partly because he had done it—fucked someone else—and she hadn’t. But more, she thought, for his honest embrace of pleasure. Pleasure was who Graham was. It was his gift. It was the reason he’d said yes. As he almost always did.

“And me?” she thought, whispering it to herself. I said no, of course. But I didn’t say no because of who I was, because I was the moral being that Graham wasn’t. The reason I didn’t do it was because I was scared, because Ian had scared me.

Not the person Ian was, no. She hadn’t even known that person. She had understood that at the reading, she realized. She remembered now listening to him talk, hearing in what he said his bitterness—so separate from what was fine in the story he’d written.

No, Ian had scared her all those years ago because she was angry at Graham when she entered that dreamy time with him. Because her alienation from Graham had created the possibility of someone like Ian. And she had known somehow that sleeping with Ian would confirm that alienation, that distance from Graham, and she didn’t want to do that. Because she loved him. She loved Graham.

She thought then of the uncomfortable sense of distance from Graham in the weeks just before he died. She had missed him in those weeks, she had wanted him back. She had been so happy when he’d suddenly seemed himself again, as she’d thought of it. When he toasted her beauty and Karen’s, when he brought her flowers.

She had imagined that they would make love that night, that last night together, he had been so at ease through dinner, through the evening. When they left the rinsed dishes in the sink instead of cleaning up, she had been certain of it, even though she hadn’t seen Graham taking his pill.

They’d gone upstairs. They undressed, they drifted separately back and forth to the bathroom to brush their teeth, to use the toilet. She had been aroused by his familiar nakedness, their nakedness together. He had touched her arm as they passed in the hallway once, and she had to catch her breath.

Finally they lay down together, and Graham turned off the light. She reached over to him, started to move her hand over his furred chest and then down.

But he stopped her hand, he held it. “I’m so tired,” he had said, and she could hear it, the exhaustion in his voice. “I just can’t tonight. Can you forgive me?”

“I’ll try,” she said. She lay back down next to him. “Big effort, though.”

They were quiet for a moment. He said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said into the dark.

“No,” he said. “I love you. I always love you.”

“Well, good. I know that.”

“I want you to know that.”

The window was open, and they heard one of the kids at the Caldwells’ house calling out, asking if someone had locked the front door. They lay still for a while. Then Graham whispered, “God, I’m such a fat, sad, needy man. I need so much . . . stuff. From life.”

After a moment, she said, “I thought you were a fat, happy man.”

That’s what she’d said. She’d made a joke of it, when he was trying to say something important to her.

Something about himself. Maybe even something about Rosemary. Yes, maybe he was beginning to try to explain Rosemary to her.

After a moment when neither of them said anything, when he was perhaps in some way hurt that she hadn’t been able to hear him, to listen, he had rescued them. He said, “Fat? You think I’m fat?” And they laughed together.

There was so much stuff he needed, she thought now. She remembered his asking her to come and work in the bookstore once. It was during one of the periods in her life when she was lost, professionally. Lost and depressed. When she was renting herself out until something else came to her.

They were sitting in bed. Graham had been reading, and she had been pretending to read, but now her book was resting, opened, across her outstretched legs. She wasn’t aware that he had stopped reading too, that he was watching her, until he began to speak, to make his suggestion, and she turned to look at him.

What had he said? Have you ever thought of coming to work in the bookstore with me? Something like that.

She hadn’t been able to tell if he meant it. He was serious, but he might just have wanted to comfort her in some way.

She said no. She said it immediately, without even thinking about it. She said she knew he would devour her completely if she was his employee as well as his wife. Wasn’t it enough that he had his cake? Why did he need to eat it too?

He had rescued them both then, too. “My cake! my cake!” he had cried, sliding over to embrace her, gobbling at her neck, her throat, opening her shirt to mouth her breasts.

What an impossible match they were! She could never have surrendered enough of herself to make it perfect for him. She sees that. And perhaps in some way that was part of what happened. That he needed too much, too much stuff, because of who he was. And that she couldn’t give him enough, because of who she was.

He had understood that, it seems to her, and she hadn’t.

And yet how open he was! How he kept coming at her with his love, with himself.

Her hand rests on the old cat, so warm, so alive.

She remembers what Sarah had said about her once long ago—that she was unreadable. But Graham had tried, always, to read her, to understand her. To keep her laughing, to keep her talking. The night he died, when they were talking in the shadowy kitchen, he had called her an open book. A book, open to him. She remembers that now too.

She whispers, “Reader, I married you.”