So I was gratified when he asked me to the Winter Ball. And I felt like a bit of a celebrity with him. He knew the band, and I didn’t mind when he interrupted our dancing to help with their equipment. I minded even less when I had to sit a number out while he played the electric piano for them. Immediately after that, when he took me in his arms and we two-stepped around the floor to his friends singing “Yesterday,” I knew most of the other kids were watching us and had one of the peak social moments of my adolescence. He whisper-sang the lyrics and I pretended he meant the words. Finally he murmured “Melody” (which is my name because, my father says, it’s what a pretty girl is like), and I’ll admit my knees got a little weak.

We stayed till the end of the dance. Jim helped the band pack up. We were invited to some sort of party but he gave his friends a noncommittal response. His hand pushed my damp dress against the small of my back as he guided me out the door and toward his maroon Corvair. He drove to the outlook near the prison, parked with the lights-on-water view out my side, and naturally lay his right arm along the back of my bucket seat as he leaned to see the skyline out my window. “Hey,” he said softly, and I felt his breath against my cheek. I turned to him, his lips arrowed in, and I couldn’t help it: I ducked.

He was quite annoyed. He drove me home without any discussion. But we resumed conversation the next week and friendship the week after that, when he called and sought my advice about how to ask Gretchen to the game. We both went to Cal, and we even fooled around a little with opiates and hallucinogenics and genitals, now and then when our significant others were not around. It was a surprise, to me at least, that we got together romantically after all. But it was fun.

We married when I was twenty-one and Jim was twenty-three. I thought we did it because it would hurt our parents too much if we cohabitated, but Jim apparently had more traditional reasons. I thought our deal was to strip off the covers and really know one another and, through knowing one another, know ourselves, but it turned out that Jim made a different deal. I thought we were going to keep exploring and he thought the time had come to tuck ourselves in.

For before we married, Jim was a continual grin at me with his sensuous mouth. His eyes and his teeth sparkled as he bicycled, unicycled, flew, hiked, camped, drove, built, fixed, disassembled. He played the piano, the organ, the concertina, harmonica. He built a clavichord and refurbished a harpsichord. He discovered Scott Joplin and learned to play syncopated rhythm. He could construct anything I could draw.

But after our wedding, he was diverted from adventure and keyboards, to home repair and computers. He stopped innovating and he smiled less. He grew hemorrhoids. He began to have frequent nightmares about losing all his teeth.

I had never lost my fear of dentists. I brushed twice a day and I flossed every night. I understood the horror of Jim’s nightmares. What I couldn’t understand was his propensity to skip nighttime brushing. He’d let himself nod out on our bed while watching TV. Finally I’d push at him to get out of his clothes. Brushing his teeth was clearly out of the question. He’d slink under the covers like a ten-year-old boy getting away with something. That’s how it seemed to me. Then he’d have the toothless nightmare and expect comfort from me.

It got to where he just wasn’t sexy any more. He wasn’t making music and he wasn’t adventuring. He never felt well. He never felt good. Our sex became less frequent and more pallid. He wanted to work on the relationship, and I wanted him to work on him. Not “work” exactly: I wanted Jim to figure out what would make him happy. He said the only thing he wanted was for me to be happier. He only wanted me to look around and see that what we had was as good as it got. I didn’t get that. Still don’t.