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By Root 514 0

of the state, the church, and my wife, we are still married. Amalie will not agree to a divorce, partly on religious grounds, but mainly because she believes we will get back together after I cure my mental illness. She thinks it would be shameful to desert me while I am sick in this way, and the fact that my mental illness is philandering does not signify. I don’t know anyone else who has this sort of relationship, although I don’t for a moment believe we are unique. My three law partners have, I think, eight or so wives among them, and in every case I have been treated to the whole litany: the insanity, the vicious revenges, the manipulations of children, the financial extortions, and I find I cannot produce a fair exchange of marriage-hell narratives. I do suffer excruciatingly, but through my own fault rather than via the malice of my wife, for she is generous, kind, and forgiving, and so I have to carry the whole fucking load myself. Jesus had a point, you know: if you really want the evildoers to suffer, just be nice.

These dinners are an example. What could be more civilized? A little family sits down to a meal and demonstrates that despite whatever differences Mommy and Daddy are having there is still love, the daddy who has left the family still loves them very much, or to put it another way (as I recently heard my daughter explain it to her brother), “Daddy likes to boink ladies more than he wants to stay with us.” In the wrong, in the wrong! Even the babes can see it, even Niko, who has only the faintest interest in other humans, can draw this fact into his vast mental library, and feel (assuming he feels anything) contempt.

I know there is no point to my boinking of ladies, as does my wife, for as I believe I have already mentioned, Amalie is in that department the acme of delight. How does she know she is tops, having so little experience besides me? Answer: she is great friends, intimate friends with my sister, who is an encyclopedia of the fuck, and she has I believe conveyed to Miri every lubricious detail of our sex lives with her Swiss clinical frankness, and Miri has assured her that she lacks nothing in that department, and further, that I am the Asshole of the Western World for cheating on such a prize. I can’t bear it; but I go anyway to these ghastly meals, as penance maybe. It doesn’t work.

Before I went over, I had the driver take me, as on many of these occasions (penitentially perhaps), to an obscure little shop off First Avenue in the Forties that sells very expensive orchids, and I bought one for Amalie. She collects them, and although she could buy out the Amazon herself with her own money, I think it is still a nice gesture. This one was pale green with magenta speckles on the usual pudendalike blossom, a Paphiopedilum hanoiensis, endangered in its native Vietnam and illegal as hell. I believe Amalie knows these orchids are smuggled, but she always accepts them, and it gives me a perverse pleasure to see my saint debauched by her lust for flowers.

Rashid dropped me off and the door was opened to my ring by Lourdes Munoz, my wife’s servant, a refugee from the Salvadorean wars. Amalie essentially saved her life through one of her do-good charities, and in contrast to the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished, which always works for me, the result of this selfless charity was the creation of the perfect house-servant and nanny. Lourdes does not trust me and has been proven correct. I got the usual stone-faced greeting, had my raincoat taken, and entered my wife’s home with my orchid.

I heard the sound of laughter coming from the living room and followed it in, with a little dread building up because I knew the source of the fun, recognizing as I did the loudest contributory voice. The family tableau, minus Dad: Amalie in her working costume of pale silk shirt and dark tailored slacks, her hair piled on her head in its golden coils, sitting in her leather sling chair with her feet pulled up under her; on a leather sofa soft as thighs sits Miri, my sister, and on either side of her my children,