The other thing Priya said was that I needed to start taking better care of myself. We were standing on the stoop by that point, next to her suitcase and a carrier containing our cat, Frankie, who was apparently now going to be just her cat. One of Priya's friends was watching us from the comfort of her car, and I offered her a wave, which she returned by briefly lifting two fingers off the steering wheel as though they were weighted down by a lifetime of burdens, me being the latest.

"David, are you listening?"

I nodded, but I couldn't honestly say I was absorbing every word. I was still concussed from her monologue in the kitchen. She never said flat out that she no longer loved me, but it was certainly implied by the bits about having grown apart, different ambitions, an opportunity for both of us, what have you. Noticeably missing from her string of justifications was the family we couldn't have, and I wondered if, unlike with Frankie, we would share custody of all those little ghosts we'd made. At any rate, I'd certainly gotten the gist.

While she went on chronicling the deterioration of my health, it dawned on me that unless we had to appear in court this was going to be the last time we saw each other as husband and wife. Really, absent some light stalking, this was probably the last time I would ever see her. She spent eighty hours a week downtown earning the piles of money that had purchased us all the comforts my honorariums could not, whereas I would go days without crossing the street, on which I could now no longer afford to live.

She was right though, about me needing to take better care of myself, especially if she wasn't going to be around to do it for me, to tell me to get outside or suggest water or ask if the spot on my back had always been shaped like Switzerland. Not the kind of the mothering she'd hoped for. And I had taken it for granted, just as I had taken her bite and her wit and her beauty for granted. But still, I wasn't in the mood for a lecture about the toll my insomnia and recreational alcoholism had taken. True, I had gained a little weight and acquired the dark, hollowed eyes of someone who spends his nights flying around on a soup ladle, pestering villagers, but I was an artist, and people always forgave artists their flaws. I would find someone else to care for me. Another Priya might not be in the cards, but I wasn't above settling, even if it were for one of those women who are easily charmed by their husbands' mediocrities.

"You haven't had a physical in four years."

No, but in that time, I'd seen God knows how many specialists who had instructed me to engage in all manner of nonsense, from exploring my feelings to masturbating into small containers. Should I also suffer the indignity of being palpated by some internist who would just tell me to take fish oil and pedal a bike in a room full of lunatics. All just to live longer. Where was the fun in that? Maybe I could get away with trading one vice for another. I'd tone down the slothfulness and take up cigarettes. I had smoked all throughout school to great merriment and acceptable side effects, only to sacrifice the delicious habit on the altar of marriage. But if our vows had now reached their expiration date, then all abstentions were off. I would smoke and stride about the city until I was tan and svelte. I'd book a physical and smoke a pack on the way to the appointment. The doctor would get one whiff of me and be driven to such distraction that I wouldn't have to worry about conflating my fibs about how often I drink and how well my penis works.

Priya was looking at me now, quietly, with either sorrow or pity, but not regret. She knew she'd made the right decision. She was more beautiful than she'd been on any day before this. I moved to run my hand through her hair, which was as thick and black as gravity, one last time, but she stopped me. She held my hand in hers, just like she had after the first time we made love on the floor of my old apartment, amidst an archipelago of evening wear. She had danced her fingers up my forearm as though it were the neck of a cello, then traced her nails along a deep crease traversing my palm. I had asked her if that was my heart line or my health line. She smiled and said, "It's the line that lulls you into believing you've all the time in the world, and that the best is yet to come."

How could you not fall in love with that.

How could you ever loosen your grip on it.

What kind of man just stands there uncomplaining while the Queen of Switzerland steals his cat and rides off into the sunrise.


.