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That evening, back in the hotel room, they had a few unscripted hours before their dinner reservation. Katherine suggested that Timothy have a massage in the Ventana's spa – to ‘work on those soldier's knees' she said. Timothy said that they should go together, but she insisted on staying behind, alone, in the room.

‘I could use some quiet time,' she said.

He didn't complain. A couple hours of separateness were welcome. As he strolled across the Ventana grounds, following the signs for the spa, he tried to conjure a picture of his masseuse. He decided she should be a young Swedish girl – tall, with strong hands. A firm grasp of English was of secondary importance.

So he was disappointed when the matron at the spa's front desk informed him that only one masseuse was available on such short notice, and that he was a ‘gentleman' named Tony.

He may indeed have been a gentleman, Timothy decided as he lay naked under Tony's pounding fists – but only if the Crips of Compton made a habit of opening car doors for their ladies. Tony was a large black man, handsome and muscular. Although he was clean cut, he had a raised scar carved along his jaw line, like a long lyrical paragraph written in Braille. Timothy decided it was probably not a massage-related injury.

But, after some initial discomfort at being naked and rubbed by another man – and one who had possibly been at the receiving end of a filet knife – Timothy soon relaxed, and was surprised to be awakened from sleep fifty minutes later at the end of the session.

‘I hope you enjoyed that, Mr. Van Bender,' Tony said.

‘I certainly did,' Timothy said. ‘Those are some powerful hands.' He realized that last remark could be construed as homosexual, so he added: ‘Much better than my wife.'

Tony smiled. His look said: Don't flatter yourself. ‘Take your time getting dressed.' He left the room.

Timothy put on his clothes, returned to the front desk and put the bill on his room tab. He left Tony a fifty-dollar bill in a small envelope.

Then he headed back to his room.

He started back across the Ventana grounds, whistling a Puccini aria and windmilling his arms, savoring the feeling of relaxed muscles and loose joints. He came to his room. He turned the key in the lock and pushed open his door. Katherine sat cross-legged on the bed, with her back to him. She was leaning over, writing in her diary, a thick, leather-bound journal with gold leaf pages. She continued writing, and studiously ignored him.

Katherine was a prodigious diarist. For as long as he had known her, she had carried out her strange daily ritual: scrupulously recording each day's events, her feelings, her longings, in a tightly wound script that practically required a magnifying glass to read. Sometimes, after fighting with Timothy, she would retreat to her bedroom like a sullen teenage girl, and write. Once, two years into their marriage, when Katherine had left the house, Timothy skulked into her closet and stared at the neat stack of journals, the identical leather-bound volumes piled in obsessive rows, between old sweaters and purses – and he couldn't resist. He carefully removed the top volume, flipped to a random page, and read.

It was a strange experience: first, the sheer tediousness of it, the obsessive detail – what she ate (‘for breakfast: muesli and skim milk; one half grapefruit; one piece wheat toast; jam'), what she wore (‘blue floral Ralph Lauren sun dress; straw hat'), where she went, whom she saw on the street (‘saw Betty inside Gristede's; later, said hello to Nancy Stanton in the parking lot'). Interspersed in the monotonous catalog were startling, mean-spirited observations, which flashed and lit the dreary page
like lightning on a moonless night. He remembered one passage in particular, about an incident that occurred when they drove to the opera in San Francisco: ‘When the police officer pulled us over, Timothy smiled at him and tried to bribe him. He did it in his usual charming way, so that it hardly seemed like a bribe. It was, of course, typical of him. Why does he feel that he is above all rules, that he can get away with anything, that the laws of the universe do not apply to him? I suppose it gives the people who work for him a kind of comfort – that this man is so clearly in charge, and able to navigate the world without impediment. But, truthfully, it
disgusts
me.' She underlined the word ‘disgusts' twice, hard enough that the pen indented the vellum.

When he read that passage, he felt dazed. He remembered the incident, when he had managed to extract himself from a speeding fine. It surprised him that he recalled it as a small achievement, as a victory of his panache and calmness under pressure. That his own wife had a different view – a hateful one – was shocking. He closed the diary and replaced it on the shelf. He was careful to replace it exactly as he had found it: the corner askew, out of alignment with the rest of the pile, a yellow sweater arm resting carelessly on the edge of the leather binding.

How had she figured out that he had read the journal? He was never sure, but somehow, she did. When she arrived home that day, she was surprised to see Timothy in the kitchen. She ascended to the bedroom, but returned a moment later, paprika red, the vein in her forehead bulging. ‘How dare you! This is the most despicable thing you have ever done.' She spat out the words. Then she added in a low, menacing voice: ‘And I know you have done many despicable things!'

Timothy refused to admit that he had read the book. She was testing him, wanting him to plead guilty, but he knew that – as angry as she was at that moment – any admission, any hesitation, would make things worse. He was unrelenting: he had no idea why she was accusing him.

Finally, she shook her head. ‘Typical,' she said, as if she knew the exact page of the diary he had read. ‘So typical.'

She stormed off and hardly spoke to him for days. He continued to pretend to be hurt and outraged – how could she falsely accuse him of something so low? – but his protests were wan and thin. He just wanted the incident to blow over.

It did, eventually. But he never read her diaries again. He was afraid: afraid that she had some kind of secret system for protecting the books, semiotics involving minute hair follicles, or traces of talcum powder, or ultraviolet light. More than that, he was afraid of what he might read, that perhaps the paragraph was just the beginning, the overture in a much grander symphony. Sometimes, he realized, it's best not to know the truth.

Now, back in the hotel room in Big Sur, he walked up behind her. Clearly she heard him enter, but made a show of continuing to write in her journal, unhurried, not threatened by his presence. When she had finished her thought, she underlined a word on the page and pressed down an emphatic period. She recapped her pen and closed the book gently. She pushed it a few inches away from herself on the bed. She turned around, finally, and looked at him over her shoulder.

‘How was your massage?'

‘All right,' he said.

‘Was she beautiful?'

‘Who?'

‘The masseuse.'

Timothy said: ‘Yes, she was beautiful.'

Katherine nodded. She had expected as much.

He sat down on the bed beside her. His weight pressed an indentation into the mattress, and the leather diary slid down into the gravity well and bumped against his thigh. Gingerly, he pushed it away, careful not to disturb it, like a loaded weapon.

‘But I love you more, Katherine. I love you more than my beautiful Swedish masseuse. I love you more than my hot young secretary. I love you more than anyone. I love you.'

‘Timothy,' she said. She looked at him with a strange expression. He couldn't place it. For an instant, it seemed like sorrow. Then he realized it was something else – regret, perhaps? But no. Timothy decided: it was love. Funny, he thought, after twenty years,
love is so fleeting, you can't recognize it in your own wife's eyes.

‘Come on,' Timothy said. ‘Let's get dressed for dinner.'

In addition to massages and hiking, they visited small art galleries – more his speed, he explained, since it involved less walking – where they bought a wind-chime and two abstract acrylic paintings that Timothy didn't care for, but which Katherine thought would go well with the soon-to-be-remodeled living room. They ate in out-of-the-way roadside restaurants, where Timothy enjoyed deep-fried oysters in cornmeal (‘You can't find that in Palo Alto,' he said) and where she ordered greasy cheeseburgers, always bloody and rare.

On Sunday, the final day of their vacation, they decided to check out from the hotel and then visit a few more art galleries on Route 1 before continuing north back to Palo Alto. At the Crabbe Gallery, Katherine found a piece of sculpture she liked, and Timothy offered to buy it for her. It was another abstract piece, two interlocking marble U shapes. ‘Perfect for the foyer,' she explained to Timothy, who figured that five hundred and ninety-five dollars was a small price to pay to end the trip in a haze of pleasantness.

As they stood beside the cash register and the gallery proprietor wrapped their sculpture in tissue paper for the trip home, Katherine began to search the inside of her purse.

‘Damn it,' she said.

‘What's wrong?' He was signing the charge card receipt and didn't look up at her.

‘My sunglasses. I must have left them in the room.'

Timothy tried to keep his face still, continued looking down at the credit card receipt. Now they would have to double-back and drive south another fifteen minutes before returning home. She had added thirty minutes to the trip because of her own carelessness.

‘It's no problem,' he said pleasantly. ‘We'll just drive back and take a look.'

He handed the clerk his signed receipt, and the clerk handed Timothy the heavy bundle of tissue paper.

He and Katherine left the store and started toward the BMW.

She stopped, touched his elbow.

‘What?' he said.

She smiled. ‘It's still our anniversary weekend, right?'

‘Sure,' he said.

‘You've been so kind to me this whole trip.'

He thought she was apologizing for leaving her sunglasses behind in the inn. ‘It's no problem, Katherine,' he said.

‘So can I ask you for one more thing?' She pointed across the parking lot to a second art gallery. ‘Can I browse in there?'

‘But we need to go back to the hotel.' Then he understood what she wanted. He was to drive back to the Ventana Inn by himself and locate her sunglasses, while she continued shopping at the second gallery. Then he would return and pick her up for the drive home. ‘Oh, I see,' he said. The August sun was beating on his scalp, and the tissue-paper-wrapped sculpture was heavy in his hands. He felt the first prickles of sweat on his neck, and realized he needed to urinate. He felt like saying, ‘You must be kidding.' Instead, he said: ‘Absolutely, no problem,' and smiled. This was typical of her, he thought to himself, as he continued to the car. He put the sculpture in the back seat. She always wanted to push him, to test his limits, to see whether she could turn a nice weekend – which he had actually enjoyed – into a fight. But he decided not to take her bait. ‘I'll be right back,' he said. He circled the car and climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Timothy,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Your American Express. Can I have it? I won't go crazy, I promise.'

He reached a sweaty hand into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. ‘Of course,' he said. He handed her the charge card.

‘I love you, Gimpy,' she said.

‘And I you,' he said. He climbed into the car and drove off.

Twenty minutes later, back at the Ventana Inn, Timothy pulled into the front reception area under the veranda, where a sign said, ‘For Guests Checking In.' The bellboy, a pleasant-looking boy
with a Midwestern moon face, hopped to the car and chirped, ‘Welcome to the Ventana Inn! Checking in?'

Timothy got out of the car and shook his head wearily. What he needed to do, more than anything else, was take a piss. ‘Not exactly,' he told the bellboy. ‘My wife and I just checked out.'

The bellboy looked in the passenger seat of the BMW to see if he should help Timothy's wife from the car. It was empty. ‘No, she's not …' Timothy let his voice trail off. ‘She sent me back here because she forgot something in the room, and she'd rather keep shopping than drive with me.' He rolled his eyes, as if to say, ‘You know how hard it can be to be married, right?' But the Midwestern bellboy just stared at him. Marriage was remote and hypothetical to him, like some novel academic theory that he had heard of, vaguely, but never spent much time dwelling on.

‘Okay,' Timothy said. He opened his wallet, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the bellboy. ‘I'm going to the bathroom, then I'll talk to the front desk. Just leave the car here for a second, all right?'

‘Yes, sir!' the bellboy said. He didn't understand what Timothy was saying about driving and shopping, and the bathroom, but a twenty-spot he understood perfectly.

‘I'll be five minutes,' Timothy said, over his shoulder.

He felt better after urinating, and so walked to the front desk in good spirits. It did not last. The line was eight-people deep, and the two clerks on duty were harried, trying to keep up with the customers anxious to check out. One couple was arguing with a clerk about their bill, yelling about the local phone charges, proclaiming them ‘absurd' and threatening that the hotel would regret trying to take advantage of them.

Timothy suddenly felt angry, too. He was not going to wait in line, just to look for Katherine's silly pair of sunglasses. They were her sunglasses, after all. So why was he here, searching for them?

Besides, the sunglasses could cost no more than – what? – two hundred dollars? Four hundred dollars? It wasn't worth the aggravation.
In thirty years of traveling across North America, of staying in countless hotels, of checking in and checking out, Timothy had never once left something in a hotel room. Why did she?