At first he’s puzzled as to why he should brood so fretfully on her faithfulness or lack of it. Their lovemaking is fulfilling: he enjoys it, his wife seems to, too, as much as he does, or, to his surprise (he’s never had this experience before), maybe more than he does. When they married, it had seemed a miracle, he’d hardly been able to believe his great luck: the ease and grace with which she’d come to him, the frank, good-humored way she’d touch him. But now … it isn’t that she gives too much meaning to sex, or exhibits insufficient affection, it’s how involved in it she gets, so nearly oblivious, in a way he can never imagine being. He finds that he’s begun to observe their life in bed with what he thinks is a degree of detachment. He sees himself, his blemishes, the paunch he can’t always hide, then her, her sheen, her glow. Why, he asks, would such a desirable woman have committed herself so entirely to such as him? And, more to the point: why this much passion, these urgencies and wants, this blind delight? By a train of logic he can’t trace to its source but which he finds chillingly irrefutable, he decides that it’s not he himself, as himself, his wife desires, but that she simply desires.
