I sent the letter. I still had almost an hour before Julia would get home. I could use it to sand the deck or walk Fletcher. Either way I’d be thinking.

I parked the mouse in the middle of its pad and stood. My desk looked neat – clutter is like chatter to my eyes, and it makes me edgy – but I straightened the framed photograph of Lily and Vera from last summer. Their eyes looked so clear, their cheeks child-smooth.

The odd thing about reuniting with a lost love is the physical aging. You get all the mirror shock of seeing yourself: this person you remember as a kid is in front of you, definitely familiar, but lined and saggy, maybe even with a tremor, but then sometimes like when you squint a certain way or during sex she looks again (except for hair color) exactly like you remember and you get a little surge of mixed youth and sadness. It’s compelling. Disturbing. Rousing. A drag. Ultimately a drag…

Julia hums. It doesn’t seem deliberate or even conscious but most of the time, if Julia isn’t talking or sleeping, she seems to emit a low hum.

At first I thought it was an indication of happiness, like a cat’s purr, but soon it came to be more annoying than gratifying, and lately it’s grown obnoxious. I now hear it as a symptom that her brain isn’t quite right.

But the bottom line is she’s just not committed enough to our marriage. If she were, she’d understand that sometimes a person just has to let out some of the pressures that have been building. It’s not pretty or fair, but if the person is determined not to use his size to destroy things or to hit people, then he has to rage to release. Sometimes it just has to happen. And a loving mate will accept that.

The young Julia would have. Oh I can see her now, petite and sweet and always looking up to me. A compliant Catholic girl. Now she’s pliant, thanks to all the time in the gym, but I can’t describe my wife as compliant. She insists on her own e-mail, her own car, even her own bank account. She read about how she should have all those things, in some book. She’s always reading a psychobabble book. I tell Julia she thinks too much but really? I think she thinks too little.

For Julia it has to be written down. She even uses book language to argue for marriage counseling. As if someone who isn’t here, 24/7, would have a shot at understanding the complexities of our dysfunction! As if…

She says a marriage counselor will make us see the tacit arrangements of our relationship. Some crap about every relationship having its unwritten rules, its invisible book, and how the counselor is supposed to help us get the book up on the table where we can read it and see if we still like what’s in it.

But see: that’s too many words already. Like the problem of the Bible. The sweet clear truth is that the few real rules are so sweet and clear that they need never be written down. God isn’t that wordy. It’s the priests who are so dimwitted they need all the hoopla.

True love doesn’t need analysis either. I remember the vision about Julia 45 years ago. I recall my excitement about the possibility of securing that vision, just two years past. But the fact is, Julia mostly repulses me now. At first I was bothered when she left my bed, but all of her attempts at words about us have swamped the beauty I used to see. The hum that was musical has grown irksome. The shaved pubes that were girlish are now a geriatric joke. I’d rather be alone.

Something like that is what I’ll write to Lily. Something like that is what I’ll tell my wife.