The Progress of Love

was all right now. Small cars were not a sign of any of the things they used to be a sign of. Even here on the bluffs above Lake Huron at the very end of life, certain shifts had registered, certain changes had been understood, by a man who couldn’t grasp or see.
    “Hear anything about—Lada?”
    It happens luckily that David has a colleague who drives a Lada, and many boring lunch and coffee breaks have been taken up with the discussion of this car’s strengths and failings and the difficulty of getting parts. David recounted these, and his father-in-law seemed satisfied.
    “Gray. Dort. Gray-Dort. First car—ever drove. Yonge Street. Sixty miles. Sixty miles. Uh. Uh. Hour”
    “He certainly never drove a Gray-Dort down Yonge Street at sixty miles an hour,” said Stella when they had got her father and his bottle back to his room, had said goodbye, and were walking back through the green corridors. “Never. Whose Gray-Dort? They were out of production long before he had the money to buy a car. And he’d never have taken the risk with anybody else’s. It’s his fantasy. He’s reached the stage where that’s his big recreation—fixing up the past so anything he wishes had happened did happen. Wonder if we’ll get to that stage? What would your fantasy be, David? No. Don’t tell me!”
    “What would yours be?” said David.
    “That you didn’t leave? That you didn’t want to leave? I bet that’s what you think mine would be, but I’m not so sure! Daddy was so pleased to see you, David. A man just means more, for Daddy. I suppose if he thought about you and me he’d have to be on my side, but that’s all right, he doesn’t have to think about it.”
    Stella, at the nursing home, seemed to have regained some sleekness and suppleness of former times. Her attentions to her father, and even to the wheelchair contingent, brought back a trace of deferential grace to her movements, a wistfulness to her voice. David had a picture of her as she had been twelve or fifteen yearsbefore. He saw her coming across the lawn at a suburban party, carrying a casserole. She was wearing a sundress. She always claimed in those days that she was too fat for pants, though she was not half so fat as now. Why did this picture please him so much? Stella coming across the lawn, with her sunlit hair—the gray in it then merely made it ash blond—and her bare toasted shoulders, crying out greetings to her neighbors, laughing, protesting about some cooking misadventure. Of course the food she brought would be wonderful, and she brought not only food but the whole longed-for spirit of the neighborhood party. With her overwhelming sociability, she gathered everybody in. And David felt quite free of irritation, though there were times, certainly, when these gifts of Stella’s had irritated him. Her vivacious exasperation, her exaggeration, her wide-eyed humorous appeals for sympathy had irritated him. For others’ entertainment he had heard her shaping stories out of their life—the children’s daily mishaps and provocations, the cat’s visit to the vet, her son’s first hangover, the perversity of the power lawnmower, the papering of the upstairs hall. A charming wife, a wonderful person at a party, she has such a funny way of looking at things. Sometimes she was a riot. Your wife’s a riot .
    Well, he forgave her—he loved her—as she walked across the lawn. At that moment, with his bare foot, he was stroking the cold, brown, shaved, and prickly calf of another neighborhood wife, who had just come out of the pool and had thrown on a long, concealing scarlet robe. A dark-haired, childless, chain-smoking woman, given—at least at that stage in their relationship—to tantalizing silences. (His first, that one, the first while married to Stella. Rosemary. A sweet dark name, though finally a shrill trite woman.)
    It wasn’t just that. The unexpected delight in Stella just as she was, the unusual feeling of being at peace with her, didn’t come from just that—the illicit activity of his big toe. This seemed profound, this revelation about himself and Stella—how they were bound together after all, and how as long as he could feel such benevolence toward her, what he did secretly and separately was somehow done with her blessing.
    That did not turn out to be a notion Stella shared at all. Andthey weren’t so bound, or if they were it was a bond he had to break. We’ve been together so long, couldn’t we just