How We Do It: Part XVII in a series

Turn up the volume while you're reading -- or not:

I took a break from the life and stood on the rooftop of our outdoor mall this evening and looked out on the city, the suburbs glimmering, the Hollywood hills shrouded in haze, the hot day dying. I thought about pulling Sophie, naked, out of the tub the other night while she seized, her beautiful body draped in my arms when it was over, my own strength, quivering, on the edge of the porcelain. That porcelain tub, so different from the one I sat in, naked, long ago, words typed on paper creased and folded into transparency, and we both vanished for a moment from each others sights which we thought took so long yet back again we were but this time we were hunched in the porcelain tub in the complete darkness where we had nurtured the hunger until it was flicked on light and again we vanished (I fold it back, just so, square by square). What's it all for? Oliver asked, his eyes filled. What is the meaning? Later, when I cried into the phone to a friend, I wondered how I could continue to do these things, the lunches, the pedicures, the combing down of cow-licks, the reading of another novel, the changing the hose from jet to shower and sprinkling the flowers in their parched pots. I should be dressed in black, like those old women in Zorba the Greek, I cried. I should be screaming in the streets, my hair on end, my hands wringing in step with my wails.

Am I not a man? Of course I've been married!

Wife, house, kids, everything ...

The full catastrophe!

Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek