“It’s worked for me.” She startled at my voice. “Working I mean. The first half year I was married to Matt I didn’t have a job. Took to staying home and indulging in unhealthy habits. It got to where I wouldn’t even venture to the little corner store for cigarettes, because that meant talking to the clerk. I got totally nauseated one afternoon, trying to smoke Borkum Riff pipe tobacco in a hand-rolled cigarette. I hate vomiting. That experience made me answer the clerk/typist ad that led to the job that led to the career that – let’s face it – has sustained me almost every way since. So no: I’d say working is good for me.”

Joy hummed a response that could have been realization, resistance, or both: “hummh!” with her lips closed, exhaling like a snort through her nose. “I don’t know,” she articulated. “I wish we could go back to how it was in the beginning. Full of future. Nowadays I don’t even want to have sex with him.” That’s how I figured out she was speaking about her marriage to Matt in particular and not about life in general. Her comment struck me, of course. One thing I thought Matt had always been good at, even when he got dull about each day, was sex. And I remembered him baiting me when he first got together with Joy, making comments about how great it was to be with someone who enjoyed it and knew how to use her teeth.

We were interrupted by the sound of Matt’s Birkenstocks on the stairs. Our son and daughter clumped after him, apparently not eager for this dinner out.

(They find Joy a drag. They’re willing to sit through grace and they try not to interrupt her boring stories, but they don’t want to call her “ma’am.”)

Matt stood at Joy’s shoulder, a shorter fatter bitter version of his younger self. His height was reduced by the back surgery but the Buddha belly has been his own accomplishment. (Our kids take after him and remind me of the man I used to love, but he doesn’t.)

He looked old and tired and tense. Joy looked resigned and unhappy. At least the kids appeared young and fresh. They left and I flipped on the porch light in their wake.

I smiled with a little satisfaction as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and study. I had a couple of hours to myself and I intended to indulge my passion for home, comfort, and coziness. (Left alone, home is where I’d always be. Cozy’s how I’d always feel. Left to my own inclinations, I would sink back into the eiderdown comfort and suffocate in feathers and my own CO2. But for two hours it’s safe. Home as respite must be okay.)

I smiled too as I recalled an encounter that morning. I was four blocks away from home, almost to the train station, when I passed a neighbor whom I don’t know. He’s a rather homely man, crane-thin, long-nosed and forward-leaning, who lives three houses from my far corner, on this side, and I pass him sometimes on the sidewalk of our block. We’re both reserved. We sometimes smile. We never speak. But this morning, finding each other a full four blocks away from our normal turf, we each exhibited a little delight, a little glee of recognition, and we naturally spoke.

“Hi.

“Good morning.”

It never would have happened that way, if I hadn’t left my house.