Francisco Goldman

each of us filling with a sense of mystical wonder and loneliness that merged into one mystical wonder and loneliness together

Why is Daddy so afraid to die? and my mother said quietly, Who knows, that’s just the way your father is. You know, he’s always been a hypochondriac. Was a terror of death, I wondered, a form of hypochondria?

Francisco, I didn’t get married to eat lunch by myself. I didn’t get married to spend time by myself.

How am I ever going to get another damned book written with this woman who makes me walk her to the subway every morning and cajoles me into coming up to Columbia to have lunch with her?

The thought was like a silent bomb: Aura will never find out about being old, she’ll never get to look back on her own long life. That was all it took, thinking about the unfairness of that and about the lovely and accomplished old lady Aura had surely been destined to become.

Destined. Was I destined to have come into Aura’s life when I did, or did I intrude where I didn’t belong and disrupt its predestined path?

Is this really happening, mi amor? Am I really back in Brooklyn again without you?

But few people who’d known me or Aura before we got together would have guessed either of us had any talent for domestic life.

Hola, mi amor. But where did you go? Why were you away so long? I know you didn’t get married just to go off by yourself like that and leave me alone here!

I rarely opposed Aura’s wishes, with the exception, I admit, of her wanting to move to a bigger apartment, or one with a garden where we could have a dog, because we really couldn’t afford to do that just yet.