Franklin Barker had won his wife's love by being the one man in her life who did not mind her brazen indifference to chauvinist talents.

All men had them, but few could understand that it was a part of a man's character that often got in the way of his clear perception of reality.

A woman, who was allowed to realize her ambitions by expressing herself in the manner she, and only she, saw fit, had a positive effect on the man closest to her in her life.

And Franklin Barker had been that man. She was not a submissive woman in the sense that she would settle for anything less than ultimate success in the pursuit of her dreams.

Perhaps that was what they had had more than anything else, the perfect dream life, where reality itself had lost its substance.

It was a strange kind of love bond that had existed between them. In fact, Franklin Barker felt sure that in some mysterious way it was still existing.

He was not a spiritualist. On the contrary, he was a very practical man. That was why he allowed his wife's talents to emerge free of his charges.

But that mysterious aura that surrounded her death still plagued him. To this day he still could not figure out what the fuck had happened.

All of a sudden one day he came home and found her dead. Doctors had diagnosed it as a cerebral hemorrhage.

It had struck her from out of the blue. There would have been no way, they had assured him, to have known that something was wrong with her.

The problem could have existed within her from birth. Things like this were impossible to detect.

And then one day the bubble burst inside her brain and it was all over. It had broken his heart. It made him philosophical.

He expected nothing. Yet with this kind of guiding attitude toward life one's senses were much sharper and alert.

Franklin Barker's mind often flew off into flights of spiritual vigor that left him more spent when it was over than any physical orgasm he had ever experienced.