And he did. Beginning with Elizabeth Anne, of course, who had always made a wish at the sight of a falling star. Of whom he had spoken to no one since she had been taken from him. Nearly eleven years now and still there were moments of emotional ambush when he missed her so much he would forget to breathe. He told Margarita of their meeting and marriage and moving to Mexico. Told her of their first child, who was quiet and studious and dearly loved horses. Told of their two later ones, the identical twins she died giving birth to.

“Ay, pobrecita,” Margarita said. “Que terrible. Que triste.”

Yes, he said. And fell asleep in her arms.

From then on he wanted none of the other girls, only Margarita. He kept his account paid for months in advance to ensure her availability to him for the entire evening on his two Tuesdays every month. Each time he came to see her, they would first make love and then talk. Or rather he would talk, for the most part, and she would listen. She was a good listener, her interest unfeigned, and she did not hesitate to say so when he was unclear in anything he told. He would then try to clarify what he meant, realizing she hadn’t understood because he hadn’t been sure what he was trying to say. In this way did she help him to better understand himself. Sometimes he would pause in his discourse and stare at the ceiling or out the window and she would wait in silence for as long as he needed to ponder before he resumed, though sometimes he would first have to ask Where was I? and she would remind him.

He spoke to her of things he had kept to himself in a hard and solitary confinement for these eleven years. He was still troubled that he could not remember the last thing Elizabeth Anne had said to him. She had said something to him a minute or two before that but he had never been able to recall what it was. Josefina told him la dona had said that the pink sky in the window was lovely, that she wished she knew what kind of bird was singing in the patio, that her backside itched. Dona Isabel said many things before you left the room, Josefina told him, and whether she was saying them to you or to somebody else and which was the very last thing, well, who knows? You know she loved you, that is all that is important. Let her last words be whatever you would like them to be. He told the crone such reasoning was self-deluding and called her an old fool. She said it was even more foolish to put so much importance on memory, which was the greatest deluder of all.

He had tried every night for a week after Lizzie’s funeral before he was able to compose a coherent letter to her parents and notify them of her death. The response was written by her father, the first letter he had ever posted to Mexico, and was terse and to the point. It advised John Roger that Mrs Bartlett was nearly mad with grief and excoriated him for his utter lack of judgment in having taken Lizzie to “that filthy, wretched place with its dearth of proper medical facility,” a lack that had no doubt contributed to his daughter’s death as much as had her husband’s own recklessness. Mr Bartlett demanded that her body be shipped home for burial in the family plot and that her children be sent to Concord as well, so they could receive “a proper upbringing.” John Roger wrote back to say Elizabeth Anne was already buried in her family’s plot and that their children would receive “a proper enough upbringing, I assure you, right here at home.”

Mr Bartlett’s next letter began with “Damn you” and closed with “Should you ever again show yourself in Concord, I swear by the Eternal I shall pummel you in the street.” In an accompanying note of two lines, Jimmy Bartlett, now a full partner in the firm, warned John Roger that if he did not ship Lizzie’s body to New Hampshire “I will go there myself to retrieve my Dear Sister’s bones by whatever means necessary.” John Roger did not answer either missive, and no Bartlett wrote to him again. And Jimmy did not come to Mexico.

He took to drink, though he had enough force of will to do it only in the evenings, when he would shut himself in his room with a bottle of mescal and linger over her photographs. As always, each picture revived not only the occasion of its making but a rush of other memories as well. Random recollections of her in radiant animation. Working the sails of their sloop and grinning under her sombrero. Gesturing for emphasis as she told him of yet another superstition or ghost story she had recently heard from the maids or old Josefina. Savoring a mango, its juice dripping from her chin. Swimming with dolphin grace in the shimmering cove. Smiling at him in the vanity mirror while she brushed her hair and he watched from the bed. A chain of memory after memory.

His mornings were glazed with hangover, yet he never failed to make his daily meeting with Reynaldo the mayordomo or to oversee the business of the coffee farm or to preside over the hacienda’s Saturday court, fulfilling his duties with a mechanical competence. As the days passed in rote sequence he told himself to cease his self- pity, that he was not the only man who had ever lost a wife. And each time would rebut himself that no, he was not, he was just the only one who ever lost her. Every visit to her grave in the enclave cemetery was a keener despair. Each day was a raw new regret.

The self-pity nearly undid him. She had been gone four months on the evening he once again spread her pictures on the desktop, but this time, sitting in the low light of the desk lamp, he lingered on his mental image of her standing at the balcony with the smoking Dragoon in her hands—and thought how simple it would be to end his pain. He finished the mescal bottle and opened a drawer and took out her Colt.

He sat for a time, cocking and uncocking the big revolver, watching the turns of the fully loaded cylinder. Take out all but one bullet and it was Russian Roulette. In Mexican Roulette, as he’d heard it defined, you took out only one. In Drunk Mexican Roulette you didn’t take out any. He envisioned the muzzle at his temple. Imagined a white blaze in his brain and his obliterated memories a scarlet mess on the wall. He could not imagine the nothingness to follow. He cocked the Colt again.

Where was best? Surest? He touched the muzzle to his forehead. His temple. Placed it in his mouth. The taste of the oiled metal was a novel fright. You would not want to fail, to achieve no more than a bad wound. Or worse by far, end up crippled. Paralyzed. Mind-damaged. Imagine the talk.

His gaze fell on a portrait photograph of her taken in a Boston studio on their second day of marriage. As she smiled for the camera she suddenly puckered her lips and smacked a kiss at him where he stood behind the photographer, who implored, “Madam, please! You must be still.” She’d made a contrite face toward the camera, then smiled again and looked at John Roger and winked—“Maaadam!”—and his breath had caught at the absolute wonder of her. An hour afterward they were eating oysters on the half shell at a window table overlooking the harbor. He recalled the briny savor of the oysters, the clean tartness of the wine. Recalled that same smile beaming at him as they touched glasses across the table and she said, “To you, Mr Wolfe. Till death do us part. Love’s dearest pledge.” So had they toasted, but he did not dwell on the remark, not until all those years later when he sat at the desk with her loaded gun cocked in his hand, staring at the picture of her taken on that day.

Love’s dearest pledge. Till death did them part. And he had thought death had done so. But as he stared at her picture he saw the truth. They were not parted. Not yet. Not while he remembered her. While he lived, she lived too—in the selfsame memories that tormented him for the lack of her living presence. Till death did them part. The pledge implied a fealty to life, an understood promise to hold to the memory of the other and damn the pain of it. To end the pain by such means as Drunk Mexican Roulette was a brute betrayal of that promise. He was not unaware of the banal cast of his argument but its effect was no less persuasive for that. And he put up the gun. He did not tell Margarita how many times since then he’d wondered if he simply lacked the courage to pull the trigger.

Margarita’s eyes were wide. I know, she said. The temptation of it. I know.

He asked how she knew, but she shook her head and looked away.

For more than four years after the loss of Elizabeth Anne he did not make love to another woman. But there were occasional late nights when a sudden remembrance of her without clothes—in her bath, swimming in the cove, lying beside him in the hammock of the moonlit verandah—would incite him to a frenzied masturbation that each time climaxed with him in tears. The more he recalled their pleasure in each other’s flesh, the more he wanted to yowl with the loneliness of his loss, his great aching yearn for the feel of her, the touch. That was when he began taking Alma Rodriguez to his bed. And though the trysts with Alma mauled his heart with the knowledge that the flesh he was relishing was not Lizzie’s and never never never again would be, he could not stop himself from returning to it again and again.

Then Alma got pregnant and he married her off. And then, fool that he was—selfish, stupid, self-deceptive fool who even after his experience with Alma would not yet face the truth that he was as much in thrall to the desires of his own damnable flesh as to the memory of his beloved—he bedded Katrina and she conceived too. And this time his selfish indulgence not only produced another bastard but provoked a man to try to kill him, and so made of the mother a widow as well. In consequence of which there followed another four years of maddening

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