Years ago, at a dinner party, Deborah listened with interest when at table one of the guests, a divorced woman with a leathery suntan, claimed that love was never entirely equal. In every love affair or marriage, one party was more deeply invested in the relationship than the other, and, this woman claimed, it was probably better to be the less deeply invested party. When she and Larry were first married, as she thought about it now, she probably loved him more than he had loved her — no probably about it, she was certain of it. Larry seemed the one more at ease in the world, a young man used to getting his way, the person who at a party had only to stand off in a corner for other people to come up to him. He had his brilliant future, and she felt herself lucky — privileged even — to be along for the ride. 

Slowly over the years, the balance changed. Deborah couldn't say for certain that Larry loved her more than she loved him, but he grew more dependent on her, at first for small things, later for decisive ones. Although Larry outwardly showed a superiority to his colleagues, he had inwardly begun to lose his confidence, and would come to Deborah to ask if he had behaved correctly in one or another of his many confrontations with deans and his department chairman. Often he hadn't, or so she thought, and she felt that she had to let him know that his behaviour was out of line. At first, she did so in the gentlest manner she could devise, but later she told him when he was wrong in the way a parent might correct a ten-year-old child.

Deborah couldn't help wonder if she had had a hand in Larry's slow downfall. He had his flaws, God knows, serious ones, but was she too naturally competent, too impatient with dithering, too good at carrying out all her tasks, so that her husband left everything to her but his petty disputes and idiosyncratic interests? She was perfectly content to leave him in his room listening to his music, looking at catalogues from the Franklin Mint, reading (the better to mock) the published work of contemporaries whose success he despised, collecting his model cars and cultivating his many grievances.

There were times when she wished that Larry had had love affairs, one even strong enough to encourage him to leave her. What a relief it would have been! But his death, somehow, wasn't a relief at all. She remembered the last line of a Noel Coward song called The Widow, which ran, "I'm wearing beautiful mourning, oh what a beautiful day." But she felt none of that. What she chiefly felt was waste — and what a miserable mistake it had all been. 

Years ago, she had read a short story — she couldn't remember who wrote it — about a man who goes into a cinema and discovers that the movie is about the courtship of his parents. As his father, in the movie, finally asks his mother to marry him, the man shouts out something like, "No. Don't do it! Don't do it!" Standing there, before her dead husband's closet, she imagines herself in the part of the man's mother in the movie; like her, she had made the mistake of doing it, of saying yes to the wrong man, Larry Siskin. She couldn't have known he was the wrong man at the time, but so he turned out to be.