For the Filmmaker’s Wife, as she recovers from pneumonia …

I needed to read the end of Ulysses. She needed to choose her wedding wine. A gutted house sits at the back of her yard with only a clawfoot bathtub inside. This is where we read Ulysses with a bottle of wine and two cigarettes.

I say that “we” read it, but that’s a lie. I lay on my back across the dusty floorboards while she read to me, so fantastically, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. And she didn’t stop, just as Molly would not have, when I begged her, appallingly delighted at this passage:

O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs around him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contract he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose from the bumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday

And I was worried about talking about dildos. O Lord. So much better it was to hear it read aloud, whispered between women, as the sun was sinking, our glasses draining, and a friendship sealed so rightfully over the pages of a yellowing book.