When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other’s face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you’ve seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that’s wrong—when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we’d exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn’t exhausted anything really—there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian
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