She worried about him. She worried that he would embarrass himself, that others would see through him, that his act fooled no one. The act, of course, was that he was a superior person forced to live in a cheapened culture, where — the unspoken part — his own talents went unappreciated. She hated the notion that people would think him petty in his complaints, neurotic in his behaviour, a fool and, yes, a loser. She didn't take it well when her sister Sharon noted how remarkable it was that so lazy a man as Larry held such high standards. She could live with a husband who had turned out to be a flop. What she minded — more for him more than for herself — was that other people saw through him.     

The one thing in which Larry didn't let her down was in his love for their children, which was unfaltering. He was proud of them, of their accomplishments, of how well they turned out. When their daughter Lisa told Deborah that she had caught Kenny, her husband, cheating on her, Deborah was surprised at Larry's cool sense of command in taking the matter in hand. She heard him, over the phone to his daughter in Denver, ask all the right questions in an authoritative and yet calming voice: Did Lisa want him back? And if so, under what terms? Would she be willing to allow him, her father, speak to Kenny, letting him know what was at stake and whether he understood what it was going to cost him to enjoy his little entertainments? How far did she want him, her father, to go? The next day he called Kenny and, as he told Deborah he would do, laid the lumber to him. He let him know that he was going to turn the case over to a tiger divorce specialist in his father's old firm. When it was over, he told him, he would be lucky to have his Bronco season tickets left. As Deborah sat listening to him, he seemed masterly. This, she couldn't help thinking, was more like the man she thought she had married. Her son-in-law returned to Lisa, all contrition, backed, no doubt, by the  fear instilled in him by father-in-law.  

But then Larry soon enough reverted to the griper and small-advantage man he had become. When he sprained his ankle, for example, he acquired a handicap parking sign that he continued to use long after the ankle was better. 

He would take in old clothes to the Salvation Army and ask large tax write-offs for them. While still teaching, he began secreting Jiffy book bags from the department at school, bags for which he had no real use. What, as the kids say, was that about?

Deborah had never said a word about these things. She had felt the need to correct him, gently, only when she felt he was in danger of humiliating himself, which, with the passing years, became more and more frequent. When he complained to her alone about the dismalness of his colleagues, the dehumanisation of computers, the atmosphere of victimhood that dominated the country, she would let him, pretending to but not really listening; she had heard it all so many times before.  

And now Larry was dead, beyond hope, beyond correction. His death had been sudden, a stroke, brought on by his diabetes, suffered at a traffic light, in Chicago, on his way home from buying more CDs at a used-record shop he had found on Clark Street. Had Larry's death been a slow one — a cancer death, say, or a disease of the nerves — they might have had time to talk about all this, about what had happened to all his brilliant plans, about whether she should have pushed him more than she did, and so much more.