Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
plastered to make love. Marlena had been having twinges of worry.
The plain truth was, Harry drank too much. It took a while to let
this enter her consciousness. But there was no denying it. He lived
from cocktail to cocktail, with meetings, lunches, dinners, and par­
ties accompanied by social lubricants. She enjoyed, at most, the oc­
casional half-glass of a bold and expensive French burgundy. He
enjoyed bold and expensive as well, a couple of bottles’ worth. She
once tried to hint that “they” should drink less—and he joked that
her less would take her down to dribbles. But he was responsive. He
heard the hint, and that night he had only one martini before dinner,
but after dinner his math and memory were not working properly,
and he increased the postprandial refreshments by several additional
nightcaps.
Perhaps she was fretting for nothing. Harry wasn’t exactly in the
gutter. He never drove when he was tipsy, or rather, he didn’t seem
tipsy when he was driving. Furthermore, he was a successful and re­
spected man, and she was lucky that he loved her. He was a playful
and resourceful lover, always trying new adventures, open to every
intimacy. He loved every freckle and mole, not that she had many of
those. But he named the ones he found. And he spoke of love in all
the ways she had dreamed of—of knowing each other’s foibles and
laughing about them, of growing old and holding hands, of giving
each other secret looks that were part of their language. And he
promised they would still do this when they were senile and too aged
to lock loins without throwing out their backs or artificial hips. He
vowed they would remember it all, and they would be more in love
than ever as the years rolled by. He said all those remarkable things
to her. If only he remembered the next morning that he had.
Would it last until they were senile? Hard to say. They had been
through trial by fire, and it would either forge them like iron or break
them apart like untempered glass. But there was this: They both de­
sired the same thing. They wanted to be loved for who they were.
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