Shaking only a little, he left her bruised and broken body lying in the gutter. Before this, he wept childishly and with fear both for himself and this woman of whom he knew so little and so much. Before that, he slammed her head against a concrete wall over and over with the force of a man who, for one moment, knows absolutely nothing of life and death. Before that, he had never hit a woman. Before that, he found her on a corner which both of them had frequented, where they had first met one another, and where he had never imagined seeing her so naked. Before that, they told each other, “I love you,” many times, in many moods, and may have meant it. Before that, she visited him in his apartment when his wife had left town, and she did not ask for money, though in the end he gave it to her and she became frightened enough to take it. Before that, he found her endlessly in the same part of town, and fucked her in the same dirty hotel, and paid her with the same ugly bills. Before that, he drove nightly through the red-light district, eyeing the prostitutes and wondering whether women really sold something he couldn’t even name for the paltry sums with which his wife bought wine.

Before that, he stopped caring for his wife, though she still cared for him, and he fucked her without knowing any better. Before that, he made love to his wife, who would lie underneath his arm and watch the breath enter and leave his body long after he had fallen asleep. And before that, when they married in the eyes of God and nation and both their families (mothers and fathers and little warbling infants in the synagogue) they had actually saved themselves for marriage, something which neither of them really, definitely, believed about the other.

And before that, he went to college, his teachers in high school liked him, his parents raised him (not badly). Before that, his mother squeezed and screamed, she sweated and swore, she felt the world’s most worthy hurt. Before that, she ate for two, she dreamed of her baby boy, she loved his beginning.

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