- - - - She thought it was a tragedy, but she should have known that nothing is truly tragic that can be fixed by forgetting. She forgot to remember how much more terrible other things are. She was that kind of person. She bought newspapers but never read much of them, and she never watched the television news because she thought she was above manipulation. Sometimes, late at night, she listened to the radio and incorporated the stories into her dreams: In her dreams her face was bombed and torn. Her hair was always innocent and victimized. In the dreams her hair asked her hands what they thought of her situation. Well, you know, they said, it's a shame, it really is, totally unexpected like that, and then they went and hid in her hair. With such dreams as these, it was not surprising that when she woke and tried to look into her lover's eyes he kept them closed though he was closer to waking than sleeping. In the middle of her sleep he saw by her rapid eye movements that all was not well, and yet he also knew and told himself, This is no tragedy. This is not the end of the world. This is not the end of the story. The end of the story was him leaving her and her staring at the walls for hours a day. The end of the story was the wife at home triumphant and the children perpetually resentful, even when they had grown and moved away. Perpetually childlike, they thought everything was tragic. He told his lover these things about his family in lieu of any pictures in his wallet. Once he had taken her to his office and she had seen framed toddlers on the desk. When he had been a young father women had smiled at him if he walked hand in hand with one of his children, to the store or their classroom or the car in which they drove to relatives who made him feel too young. This was before he was old enough to want to feel young again. Nice photos, she had said, thinking she was being witty. She always made the wrong interpretations of gestures, especially her own. That was the kind of woman she was. She was the kind of woman he would leave behind, saying Good-bye, good-bye, I'm sorry, but good-bye. She knew this, but thought it an indication of the state to which her life had sunk: to be left, like that, by a man like that. This was not the end of the story. This was only the beginning. They were in the middle of their hours together, sleeping though they were not tired. They practiced for the time when they would be old, and separate, and kept awake by the test patterns that ended every broadcast day.
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