The private pediatrician that Ted insisted on is after repossessing either her children or her uterus.

Ted and she extended the his-and-hers joke to the children as well. The boy for him; the girl for her. It has been three months since Ted left to go a-whoring without a proper goodbye to his boy, her girl. His apostasy, for she thought marriage not an article but a poem of faith, has bisected her soul and placed a canopy of insulating placenta over the plexus of her nerve endings. The betrayal has given her the omniscience and the invulnerability of a sleepwalker. She sees the future before it fails to happen. Not long before the bon voyage, Ted brought home a marble-topped table that he had looted from a dying man’s flat. Some displaced West Yorkshire falconer whom Ted used to look in on as an excuse to talk birds and to get away from Sylvia’s leading questions and the recriminations that he very likely heard in the crying of his own children. Sylvia has to keep her furnishings deliberately spare. Each little hutch, highboy, and sideboard burns its way into her consciousness like a character. As a child, she gave her parents’ battered gear whimsical Dickensian names ante-ceded by a Mr. or a Mrs. In the altitude of her imagination—she gets a nosebleed still, now and again, working on a poem—she could hear the furnishings converse. Like her parents, they spoke of the weather and annoyances. She and the marbletop hadn’t had time to get properly acquainted when Ted packed his satchel, left the nugatory checkbook and the better part of his working papers (obviously as an excuse to return), and then left his gaping singularity so barbarously magnetic in the center of the room that she cannot even leave the kitchen drawer open for fear that the knives might fly out. With Ted gone, the stolid marbletop appropriated his role in her cerebral chamber play, the brutish, serpentine stranger in the house. And now Abdiel, Ted’s editor/critic/fellow academic/dearest friend, who will not round things by sleeping with Sylvia, nor respond more than nigglingly to the cataract of her recent poems, has warmed her cold flat with a calculated gift. A Portobello facsimile of a Greek bust. A sleeping woman with a half-veiled face. His way of praising her poems, without actually praising her poems, and turning her gently from his journal and his bed, the circuitous way around.

Seeing the bust for the first time, she was reminded of an epic Ted wrote soon after the birth of their son. It was written in the rough. It was unedited and ne’er to be when her bad twin got ahold of it and turned it to ticker tape after receiving another phone call from one more biddy confiding into her dish towel. In the poem, a Bronze Age warrior is incubated in the bronze ground, basted by the bronze tears of the tyrannized villagers whom he must grow up to emancipate by any means insurmountable. The hero is born with a cowl over his face and a sword across his breast. His enemies snare and suffocate him in a magic mesh. The vitreous skull of a horned stag marks the cocoon of the warrior’s grave, cloaked in a veil for sorrow. She wanted her son to be spared the sentiment of the poem, and she wanted Ted to suffer from the heart for what he might have gotten away with libidinally.

She creaked the marbletop across the floor, moving backward, hunched, seeing herself in her mind’s eye, a perfect crossbow. She did it the mercy of cleaning its hull of the London air. Seven years have elapsed since the passage of the Clean Air Act, and the coal smoke is still left to fester in the atmosphere, blackening the laundry on dense days, and killing off the infants and the old. She buffed the table with a drizzle of floor wax.