Pom’s square face reddened, and his black hair flopped over his eyes as if he had spent the evening shimmying with a parade of danseuses, but he grinned, a reluctant white grin that split the aforementioned five o’clock shadow like a knife blade through dark plush. By the end of a long day Pom frequently looks like a pirate in a child’s book.

“She’d say it never hurt a real man to sow a few oats,” he said, leering showily at me and twirling an imaginary mustache. And I laughed again, because it was just what she would say, and because he looked, in the lamplight, so much like the much younger and far lighter-hearted man I had married eighteen years before. That man was intense and impulsive and endearingly clumsy, and somehow astonishingly innocent, though he was certainly no stranger to strip joints and bovine boobs. I had not seen that man in a long time. I held out my arms to him that night, and he came into them, and it was near dawn before we slept. That had not happened in a long time, either.

Pom has amazing eyes. They are so blue that you can see them from a distance; you notice them immediately in photographs, and the times I have seen him on television they dominate the screen as if they were fluorescent. It may be because they are fringed with dense, dark lashes and shadowed over by slashes of level black brows, and set into flesh that looks tenderly and perpetually bruised. His thick black hair is usually in his eyes. All of this darkness makes the whites extraordinarily white, and very often they seem so wide open that the white makes a slight ring around the irises. All that white should, I tell him, make him look demented, a mad Irish visionary, but it is the genesis of his apparent innocence, I think. Much of the time Pom seems wide-eyed with surprise at the world.