Friday night

The shadow of the fruit cart on the wall, pears, shaped like certain women. Some evenings arrive all too quickly. The light dims, and the pale moon hangs low in a cold sky before I have had the chance to give any shape to the day. These evenings, generally in winter, when the cement smells raw, when I walk outside to search the car for my wife's purse in a pair of slippers are my least favorite.

Perhaps it was that she said to me, "Honey, nine years from now you'll be forty," that sent me into this tail spin. I suddenly become arithmetically incisive, measuring out the rim of milk on cereal bowls, the crust of old sandwiches, the unfailing light of the computer screen, these things that measure our life. I panic on these evenings, begin filling out job applications, I lie next to my wife on the couch, and she says,

"Isn't this nice, finally getting a chance to snuggle?"

And I sit up rigidly, and say, "Someday, this is all going to end."

"Everyone dies," she reminds me.

And first I say something along the lines of "yes, but does everyone really live," followed by, "Hollywood movie scripts are easy to write. You just put two people on a couch and have them talk about changing their lives. And either he gets up and makes a pot of coffee, and we get a whole montage of the change that has been wrought, or, they drift into dreamless sleep. Either way, I should be writing scripts." And, after a pause. "Yes, but how can I live on?"

She tells me that people live on through their jobs, their children.

I tell her that it makes me want to write books, that making copies of articles for graduate students will probably not last throughout eternity. I mean it, though not entirely, the coffee stays untouched in the kitchen. I go into the kitchen and look at the wine rack, the arches of its shadow on the yellow wall, the shape of a pear. These are the nights when the anesthetics are done, the television off, no games, no conversation, no sex, nothing to distract me from the reality of time's infernal push. But these things are best put to bed before midnight. They will be gone in the morning, but for the unfinished application blinking solemnly. Faint cries will wake me in the morning.