This was before anyone had even discovered the multiverse, which has turned out to be tiresome. No sense in watching yourself do the same things over and over, as a flock of geese V ing overhead, white bodies reflected in the flooded rice fields of youth. I say to my second lover, as we lie in her bed that I think I’m falling in love, but I don’t elaborate more. She makes coffee in her underwear, and I dream of smoking a cigarette in bed. I do not tell her, as she stirs the egg yolks, drops butter into the pan, that I don’t mean I’m falling in love with her. What I mean is that I’m falling back in love with my wife, who berates me, who is not tender, who will never, as far as I can tell, make me eggs while I lie in bed dreaming of cigarettes. But I’ve seen myself now, the bore of it, all those other lives, when I fell in love with her instead or a stranger in France, how it all amounts to the same thing, after all. Just me lying in bed, wishing I was someone else.
