Nicky Fincher was somewhere between buzzed and resolutely shit-faced when he climbed over the brick wall—not too high—of Rockside Cemetery. It was night, so deeply nocturnal that only the crickets and corpses could hear the bumbling steps of the forty-year-old drunkard, and neither of these parties voiced any objections to the disturbance.

Still in his grey suit, as if he'd just come out of the office, his tie loosened around his neck, like a schmuck, Nicky made his way through the tombstones, half-blind. Tombstones. An army of tombstones.

He was looking for his wife.

Soon enough he stumbled upon the marker of his wife's final resting place; rays of moonlight informed him of a set of letters and numbers. Albertine Fincher, loving wife, amazing woman, born in 1961, died in 1997. Never mind that she thought Jim Carrey was a superb comedic actor, that she aspired to be an editor for [i]The New Yorker[/i], that her favorite song was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles, and so on and so forth into oblivion.

Nicky got on his knees, dirtying his pant legs, reading these letters and numbers that represented—to an outside observer at least—a very basic outline of Albertine's life. Resting his hands on his thighs, his face beaded with sweat, Nicky said, "Been six months, huh?" He almost laughed. "Doesn't feel like six months. Does it? Heh?" He leaned forward, as if expecting a answer, and not getting one. "God, I'm sorry." He then said "sorry" again, almost like a robot, but laced with too much shame.

He dug his nails into his pants, and had his legs not been clothed he would've surely broken the skin.

The shame of it.

The shame of it would outlive him.

"I'm sorry," Nicky mumbled. It was truly a shameful act to be thinking about what Albertine looked like; it wasn't, of course, shameful that he missed her physical presence, but rather it was the fact that he now thought about her attractiveness.

When she was alive, it was easy to put aside how she carried herself, how she was the most gorgeous brunette Nicky had ever met in his life, how her bare breasts were as if written about in the Song of Solomon, how her buttocks fit perfectly in the palms of his hands, how she would work him like he was a dog or a dolphin, begging for a treat, only to relieve him of his suffering at the right moment, at the apex of something trying and yet wonderful.

Degrading to contemplate.

This was not to say Nicky, even in his grief, didn't attempt in earnest to find a physical replacement for Albertine. For a man who had recently hit forty he was by no means unattractive, with the asterisk that his hairline was no longer the upstanding citizen it had been in its youth. He could find a replacement, certainly—be it a whore or a friend of a co-worker. For instance, as Nicky gazed at Albertine's tombstone with empty eyes, like Jack Nicholson's at the end of [i]One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest[/i], his mind rewound the film and showed him the unfortunate encounter with Clarice, who was a fairly cultured whore. There were a lot of whores in New York, but not many of them were into Don DeLillo novels. With Clarice, Nicky at least figured he was in good hands. Still, it was not enough. And not for lack of trying. In the midst of making love—or fucking, to put it more accurately—Nicky kept seeing flashes of Albertine, his dead wife, and at some point he gave up. So did Clarice. Nicky cried into Clarice's chest, and Clarice petted his head like he was a wounded dog.

No, he decided that, at least for the foreseeable future, he must have Albertine; he wanted to feel her again.

With no one to interrupt him, with no one to tell him he shouldn't do it, he started thinking about Albertine, considering her face, her curves, how she looked when she got out of the shower, and his mind sank into the image.

His left hand moved, unconsciously, along his pant leg, toward his belt, undoing it. His zipper went down, down, down—

By the time Nicky realized what he'd done he had made a mess on his fingers, on his groin, on the earth beneath him.

He could not stop thinking of Albertine.

"God," he said tiredly, wanting to pass out and not wake up.