"Judas priest, woman, what do you want me to do? Get down on my bended knees?”
"I only want you to behave a little differently.”
“Well, maybe I’d like you different, too.”
“I don’t disgrace myself.”
“No, by Christ, you’re respectable—I’ll give you that.”
Twenty-four years, in all, were scoured away like sandbanks under the spate of our wrangle and bicker. Yet when he turned his hairy belly and his black haired thighs toward me in the night, I would lie silent but waiting, and he could slither and swim like an eel in a pool of darkness. Sometimes, if there had been no argument between us in the day, he would say he was sorry, sorry to bother me, as though it were an affliction with him, something that set him apart, as his speech did, from educated people.