People expect that because we're both dull in conversation and obnoxiously good-looking that our marriage is free of turbulence and difficulty. Those who know us enough as to have penetrated the veneer of affability--the most resilient and decorous of defenses--and proceeded past the barriers of perfunctory charm have adopted the notion that our personalities, though radically, tragically different, are in fact fortuitously matched, in that two opposite extremes will somehow work in concourse to neutralize and dilute each other. They are asses, and mistaken.  In fact, Nancy and I are a desperate case. I am crazy, certifiably so,  and she is atypically sane. I am irrational, eternally adrift, lost and errant in the wide abyss of fruitless thinking and desultory, pseudo-intellectual meditations, while she s pragmatic and fundamentally thoughtless. Mind you, I do not imply that Nancy is stupid--it is only that she is mentally prudent, has established herself and her philosophies within the parameters a kind of facile certainty, that which cannot be grappled with or questioned, and thus prefers knowledge to thought--established to speculative--and entertains very little intellectual activity. But this is irrelevant. Nancy herself is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I love her, in my own desperate, defective way, and that she is acclimated to me, has accepted our marriage as an immemorial and thus essential institution in her life, the inexorable infrastructure around which she has cultivated her beliefs, her attitudes, her tendencies, her morals, and without which all of those fragile contingencies would collapse. To lose Nancy would break my heart. Losing me would be for  her an inconvenience, and on her own warped scale of human pain and loss, this, too, would be a form of tragedy. I suspect that somewhere, at her heart's beating core, where no manners or affectations or artifices can penetrate, the primary shape that her emotions assume before me, her betrothed and her beloved, would be revealed in the form of a fond contempt. If people could be shed of their husks, each brittle layer of contrivance and disengenuity peeled off such that the first, unadulterated individual is exposed and open to scrutiny, and if such a process might be applied to Nancy, I would find that at her core she is as incapable of love as I am of humility. She would be sculptural, gracefully lapidary, sonorously hollow, pure of all the internal muddle drudged up in the sordid affairs of human attachment. In short, she would be a hopeless case, and this, more than any bathetic marital vows, more than the solemn seal of religious and governmental pomp under which the Church and State presumed to join our hands, sanctifies our dying, dissolute marriage; and one day, on the welcoming horizon of looming death, when we have all but moldered away, and nothing but the integument of wrinkled skin hides from us our essential emptiness, we will die together, together as marriage dictates; sad, but together.