Sometimes, she thought she didn’t know what he felt because he didn’t know. Sometimes she thought he was horribly unable to explain it to her. But other times she thought she was the one inept at putting two and two together for herself, let alone putting together things that were complex and foreign to her. Things outside herself. She worried she was unable to infer anything, to puzzle anything out.

Then she thought: She didn’t even know how she felt. How could she know him?

She hadn’t realized yet that she had a tendency to talk into the spaces where someone else might speak, spaces in which they may tell her something, maybe what she didn’t want to hear. How she filled things out so that she could continue along as she wished.

So, she didn’t wonder, for instance, if perhaps it wasn’t the silence that left her lonely, but her own sound. If perhaps it was her own voice that fenced her in, alone, without him.

“It wasn’t always like this, was it?,” Aida said, “Not this bad. Right? Something happened. So: What happened?”

“If I could lay it all out,” she said. “I would love to be able to lay it all out.” She palmed the glass of iced tea, drew a line in the condensation. “There are only gaps and points of confusion and missed moments and opportunities and I can’t identify them all. What is important, what doesn’t matter? What have I confused as being one when it is the other?,” she said, “I don’t know.”

She was grateful Aida was an analyst. In comparison to some of Aida’s clients —  the schizophrenics maybe?— she might even reside on the spectrum of well-adjusted. Also: Aida was content with confusion and shades of black. The tints. Something she very much admired.

“If only I knew.” She continued. “I don’t know which things fall into which category; what is cause, what is effect, what just happens. It isn’t so clear. Honestly, I wonder if there is any ‘Why’ at all. Do you think there is always a ‘Why’?” She asked Aida. “Because if there isn’t a Why, she worried: How will I ever know what to do?”

Aida laughed, shifted in her patio chair. “As an analyst, I believe there’s a ‘Why.’ Or a possibility for one, at least.”

Aida motioned for her cat, Elektra, who was rolling on the grass in the sun. “Gaps and points of confusion and missed moments and opportunities — It’s all ‘Why’ Right?” Aida said, picking up Elektra’s toy from the ground. “But yeah, identifying the parts of ‘Why?’  Rough.”

“I wonder how Mark feels,” Aida added, swinging the feather-on-a-string in front of Elektra, so she would bat at it.

 What happened was Mark suggested they pick a day, which was the worst idea ever, but she was trying not to micromanage and honestly she didn’t know what to do either, so she said fine. He picked Sunday—the Lord’s Day—which was funny, although she didn’t think he meant it to be. Neither of them was religious anyway.

It would all be too much pressure she thought, and too mechanical, and when Sunday came around, she was standing in the kitchen eating a banana when he said he was looking forward to tonight. She cringed.  “Are you talking about sex?,” she said. She is not sure why she asked. She knew he was talking about sex. It was probably because his circumspect way of putting it made her feel all the more detached. “Why did it have to be tonight?,” she didn’t ask, “Why not this afternoon, why not now?” The fact that Mark was taking some initiative, while she took absolutely none, did not even cross her mind. He was still standing in the hall when he said “yes, I was talking about sex” and asked if she was also looking forward to it tonight, to which she could only reply that this all felt very strange and alienating. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun, she thought.

What happened was later that same afternoon Mark came home with tulips. Which of course were lovely and she loved them. He had remembered she liked tulips specifically. He had gotten orange ones, and while they were not the white ones she would have chosen, she noticed how well they matched the puffy diamond chair and the planter. They would look beautiful on the dining room table. The tulips were closed, chilled from the florist’s shop, so she decided she would place them in warm water. She was cutting the stems at an angle in the kitchen sink and placing the tulips in a vase when she asked Mark why he had gotten them. He so rarely brought flowers home.

In retrospect, she supposed the answer was somewhat obvious, it being the Sabbath and therefore the Day of Sex, but for some reason she did not connect those things. For some reason she thought perhaps he had gotten them because everything was such a mess, the flowers some sort of acknowledgment. At least they could agree they were in this mess together.

He stood at the counter near the doorway when he answered, suggesting that perhaps, they could go into the bedroom now.

“Well. I thought. Perhaps. We could go… into the bedroom, now,” he said. At which point her heart dropped down through the floor, and through her landlord’s apartment below, the second and the first floors, and through the basement until it landed in the earth and hid itself there. Without her heart she felt empty and completely alone and absolutely desireless. Her body seized and shut. She took the warm vase into the dining room purely to have a few steps to herself in which she could think and returned to the kitchen.

She knew how hard he was trying. This wasn’t his fault, not all of it anyway, it was also hers of course, and regardless: she didn’t want him to feel rejected, however fumbling and awkward it all was. She felt horrible feeling what she felt. She wished she still had her heart. She wished she could feel what she didn’t.

But it killed her, the idea of going into the bedroom like robots, and so she told him how much she appreciated his effort and how sorry she was: She just couldn’t join him. She felt something inside her break. She told him she would be back soon and went for a walk through the winding pathways of their neighborhood park and she cried. When she returned to the apartment, she hugged him and said thank you for the flowers and for the trying, she knew he was doing it for her, or for both of them, but also very much for her.

Later that night they returned from seeing the play. She sat down on the couch with a glass of wine. He stood in the living room’s large double doorway and asked if she wanted champagne. She should have just said yes, she knew that and later wondered why she couldn’t just go along with things. She made things difficult, she knew. But to the offer of champagne she said maybe a bit later, she already had wine. At which point, he left the room and after a few minutes returned, joining her on the couch, all jitters and nerves. He turned to her and said: “I don’t know how to do this.”

A sound escaped her mouth. It was a sound of judgment. She wished immediately she could take it back. He was a grown man and she a grown woman, both approaching forty. And wasn’t this supposed to be something they wanted, not something they had to do like grocery shopping or mopping the floor. Which is exactly what she told him. Perhaps they should forget about all this, at least for the night, take the pressure off, she added, it was all turning out to be so stressful, which was not at all the point.

Now, at home, just as before, she knew she should have just gotten on with it, said yes to the champagne and joined him in the bedroom. Of the two of them, she was the one to get things done, after all. Or so she had always believed. But the thought of it made her feel even more separate from everything.

She wished she were able to connect things, her feelings, her body, herself and him. She wished she could go along with it, and trust that her heart would find its way back, if only a little later than she’d hoped, a little worse for the wear. Perhaps she could dust it off.

Later that night, after Mark said he didn’t know what to do and she said they should leave it alone for now, they sat on the new, speckled couch holding hands and watched a movie. He drank a beer, she a glass of wine, and when the movie was over they went to the bed that she knew he would take if they got a divorce, and they fell asleep.

The next day, when it was bright and warm, sun streaming in through the windows, she noticed the orange tulips resting in the vase on the dining room table. They had not opened. Not at all. Not one.