“It doesn't matter. It's not important. It just had to be done. I had to tell you. There is no good day for something like this.”

“Are you willing to end it?” She was pushing and she knew it, but she had to ask, had to push him; she still couldn't understand what had happened, and why. Why on this blistering hot day had her husband come home from the television station where he reported the news every night and told her that he was leaving her for someone else? “Will you stop seeing her, John?”

Slowly he had shaken his head. “No, Sam, I won't.”

“Why?” Her voice had dwindled, childlike, and there had been a fresh wave of tears. “What does she have that I don't have? She's plain, and she's boring… and you-you always said you didn't like her… and you hated working with her, and-” She couldn't go on, and he watched her, almost feeling her pain as his own.

“I have to go, Sam.”

“Why?” She grew frantic as he moved into the bedroom to pack his clothes.

“Because I do, that's all. Look, it's not fair of me to stay here and let you go on like this.”

“Please stay…” Panic crept into her voice like a dangerous beast. “It's okay, we'll work it out… honest… please… John…” The tears were streaming down her face, and he suddenly turned hard and distant as he packed. He became almost frantic, as though he had to leave in a hurry before he fell apart too.

And then suddenly he turned on her. “Stop it, dammit! Stop it… Sam, please…”

“Please what? Please don't cry because my husband is leaving me after seven years, eleven if you count the time at Yale before we were married? Or please don't make you feel guilty while you leave me for some goddamn whore? Is that what you want, John? For me to wish you luck and help you pack? Christ, you walk in here and blow my whole life apart and what do you want from me? Understanding? Well, I can't give it to you. I can't do anything except cry, and if I have to, I'll beg… I'll beg, do you hear me…?” And with that, she collapsed in a chair and began to sob again. With a firm hand he clasped the suitcase into which he had thrown half a dozen shirts, a pair of sneakers, two pairs of dress shoes, and a summer suit. Half of it was hanging out of the suitcase, and he was carrying a fistful of ties in one hand. It was impossible. He couldn't think straight, let alone pack.

“I'll come back Monday when you're at work.”

“I'm not going to work.”

“Why not?” He looked disheveled and distracted, and Samantha looked up at him and laughed softly through her tears.

“Because my husband just left me, you jackass, and I don't think I'm going to feel like going to work on Monday. Do you mind?”

He hadn't smiled, hadn't softened in any way. He just looked at her awkwardly, nodded, and walked quickly out the door. He dropped two ties as he went, and after he was gone, Samantha picked them up and held them for a long time as she lay on the couch and cried.

She had done a lot of crying on the couch since August, but John hadn't come back. In October he had gone to the Dominican Republic for a long weekend, gotten a divorce, and five days later married Liz. Samantha knew now that Liz was pregnant, and when she had first heard, the news had cut through her like a knife. Liz had announced it one night on the broadcast, and Sam had watched her, her mouth open, shocked. So that was why he had left her. For a kid… a baby… a son that she couldn't give him. But in time she came to understand that it wasn't only that.

There had been a lot about their marriage that she hadn't seen, hadn't wanted to see, because she loved John so much. His sense of competition with her, his sense of insecurity over Sam's success in her own field. No matter that he was one of the top newscasters in the nation, no matter that people flocked for his autograph everywhere they went, John always seemed to feel that his success was an ephemeral thing, that any day it could be over, that they might replace him, that the ratings could change his life. For Sam, it was different. As assistant creative director of the second largest advertising agency in the country, her position was tenuous, but less so than his. Hers was a fickle profession as well, but she had too many award-winning campaigns behind her to make her feel vulnerable to the winds of change. As she sat alone in her apartment all through the autumn, she remembered bits and pieces, snatches of conversations, things he had said…

“For chrissake, Sam, you've made it to the top at thirty. Shit, with bonuses you make more money than I do.” And now she knew that that had bugged him too. But what should she have done? Quit? Why? In her case why not work? They couldn't have a baby and John had never wanted to adopt one. “It's not the same if it's not your own.” “But it becomes your own. Look, we could adopt a newborn, we're young enough to qualify for the best. A baby would mean so much, sweetheart, think about it…” Her eyes had glowed when they discussed it, his had always glazed, and then he would shake his head. The answer to the question of adoption was always no. And now he didn't have to worry about it anymore. In three more months he would have his first child. His own. The thought of it always hit Samantha like a physical blow.

Samantha tried not to think about it as she reached the top landing and opened her front door. The apartment had a musty smell these days. The windows were always closed, the heat was too high, her plants were all dying and she had neither thrown them out nor taken care of them. The entire apartment had an aura of unlove, of disuse, as though someone were only changing clothes there, but nothing more than that. And it was true. Samantha hadn't cooked anything more than coffee there since September. She skipped breakfast, ate lunch with clients as a rule, or with other executives of Crane, Harper, and Laub, and dinner she usually forgot. Or if she was absolutely starving, she grabbed a sandwich on the way home and ate it in the waxed paper, juggling it on one knee as she glanced at the news on TV. She hadn't seen her plates since the summer and she didn't really care. She hadn't really lived since the summer, and sometimes she wondered if she ever would again. All she could think of was what had happened, how he had told her, why he had left her, and that he was no longer hers. Pain had given way to fury, which led to sorrow, which grew to grief, which reverted once again to anger, until at last by Thanksgiving her emotions were so frayed at the edges that she was numb. She almost blew the biggest campaign of her career, and two weeks before that she had had to go into her office, lock the door, and lie down. For a moment she had felt as though she were going to have hysterics, faint maybe, or perhaps just put her arms around someone-anyone-and burst into tears. It was as though there were no one now, no one to whom she belonged, no one who cared. Her father had died when she was in college, her mother lived in Atlanta with a man she found charming but whom Sam did not. He was a doctor, and pompous and self-satisfied as hell. But at least her mother was happy. Anyway, Sam wasn't close to her mother, and it wasn't to her that she could turn. In fact she hadn't told her of the divorce until November, when her mother had called one night and found Sam in tears. She had been kind, but it did little to strengthen the bond between them. For Sam and her mother it was too late. And it wasn't a mother that she longed for, it was her husband, the man she had lain next to, and loved, and laughed with for the last eleven years, the man she knew better than her own skin, who made her happy in the morning and secure at night. And now he was gone. The realization of it never failed to bring tears to her eyes and a sense of desolation to her soul.

But tonight, cold as well as weary, for once Samantha didn't even care. She took off her coat and hung it in the bathroom to dry, pulled off her boots, and ran a brush through her silvery gold hair. She looked in the mirror without really seeing her face. She saw nothing when she looked at herself now, nothing except a blob of skin, two dull eyes, a mass of long blond hair. One by one she peeled off her clothes as she stood there, dropping the black cashmere skirt, the black and white silk blouse she'd worn to work. The boots she'd pulled off and thrown on the floor beside her were from Celine in Paris, and the scarf she unknotted at her neck was a black and white geometrical pattern from Hermes. She had worn large pearl and onyx earrings and her hair had been severely knotted at her neck. The coat, which hung damply beside her, was bright red. Even in her dazed state of loss and sorrow, Samantha Taylor was a beautiful woman, or as the creative director of the agency called her, “a hell of a striking girl.” She turned the tap and a rush of hot water ran into the deep green tub. Once the bathroom had been filled with plants and bright flowers. In summer she liked to keep pansies and violets and geraniums there. There were tiny violets on the wallpaper, and all of the fixtures were French porcelain, in a brilliant emerald green. But like the rest of the apartment, it lacked luster now. The cleaning woman came to keep everything from getting dusty, but it was impossible to hire someone to come three times a week to make the place look loved. It was that that had left it, as it had left Samantha herself, that polish, that luster that comes only with a warm touch and a kind hand, the rich patina of good loving that shows on women in a myriad tiny ways.

When the tub was full of steaming water, Samantha slipped slowly into it, let herself just lie there, and closed her eyes. For a brief moment she felt as though she were floating, as though she had no past, no future, no fears, no worries, and then little by little the present forced itself into her mind. The account she was currently working on was a disaster. It was a line of cars the agency had coveted for a decade, and now she had to come up with the whole concept herself. She had come up with a series of suggestions relating to horses, with commercials to be shot in open country or on ranches, with an outdoorsy-looking man or woman who could make a big splash in the ads. But her heart wasn't really in it, and she knew it, and she wondered briefly for how long this would go on. For how long would she feel somehow impaired, damaged, as though the motor ran but the car would never again get out of first gear? It was a feeling of dragging, of pulling down, like having lead hair and hands and feet. When she stepped out of the tub, with her long silky hair piled in a loose knot atop her head, she wrapped herself carefully in a huge lilac towel and then padded barefoot into her room. Here again there was the feeling of a garden, a huge four-poster was covered with white eyelet embroideries and the bedspread was scattered with bright yellow flowers. Everything in the room was yellow and bright and frilly. It was a room she had loved when she did the apartment, and a place she hated now as she lay in it night after night alone.