There is the occasional household stars-and-stripes, draped above doorways, between Neoclassical columns, but you don’t spy a single political sticker. In the spirit of cautious bipartisanship, one of you pronounces the town adorable, and the other agrees, True.

Your wife parks beside the river. She has been your wife – you have been wives – for thirteen days, since a registry ceremony on the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, planned and paid for ten months in advance, because who could be fucked waiting for Australia to get its shit together? Since there and here you’ve compiled a mental list of fs that pluralise to v – life to lives, wolf to wolves, knife to knives – they all sound vital and gleaming. The river has been company since Tahawus, where it travelled under a different name. But it is freshly beautiful here, at this hour, in the cold gold ameliorating light that follows rough weather.

As for the diner, it is patently ex-Brooklyn, and the menu is ex-Brooklyn, but the prices are ex-ex-Brooklyn. You order a vegetarian omelette, like a recuperating Alice Munro character. Your wife orders a turkey club that she will tear the crusts from like a child. And a quad Americano for the road (really for you).

Okay? you ask, and she answers by taking a dessert spoon from the cutlery cradle and pressing its cold contours against one heavy eyelid, then the other. She lays the spoon on the Formica table and gets up without a word to look for the toilets.

Is she still angry? Are you? Daybreak this morning, watching your wife’s face, too far from your face in the mealy motel light, recataloging and reapportioning all its trouble: the superior crease near-centre of her brow, last night’s colour stained into the deep grain of her lips. The thin, aquiline nose, twice broken; only once in the ring, only once by a woman. Your beautifully fierce, fiercely beautiful wife – what wouldn’t you do for her? You’re asking this now, in the ex-Brooklyn diner, asking it of the galactic melamine depths of the tabletop, fingertips seeking out the reassuring chips and divots in its surface. The server reappears with the coffee, in what looks like a soup container. Your friend, she begins – not blinking when you correct her; my wife – your wife, know if she’d prefer whole-wheat, rye, sourdough, seven-grain...?

Rye, you tell her with nascent authority, the deceased-estate-auction ring a ratifying weight on your finger.

Your wife returns as the plates come down, heavy with home fries. You invite her into the game of wives-knives-wolves, and she ruins it. Rooves, she offers distractedly, tearing crusts away from her sandwich. Hooves. Loaves.

The game is dead. She is still salty.

Do you want a lover or a sparring partner? you asked her early on. You ask her again now.

Both, she would have once answered. Today she says, I just want a good wife.

Wifedom is new, but the arguments feel ancient. Inherited and irresolvable. Really there is only ever the one argument, for which the American hotel has provided optimal conditions. Every room seems purpose-lit. Recalling voyeuristic large-format photographs of intimate discontent, you close the blinds. It makes little difference. The sense of audience remains.

It is not, has never been a question of Child vs. No Child. Only the interminable question of whose ovum, whose womb, whose body and vocabulary will be significantly reproportioned, whose career will take the harder spill.

Is it marriage or the American hotel room that has thrown fuel at this argument? Possibly it has something to do with the ecliptic, all-consuming silences that enfold hotel-room rows, which you’ve come to suspect have something to do with the size of the mattresses. Could you pass all night in your own bed, in your own home, without speaking? Your own bed is simply not wide enough. How to resist, even when righteously furious, the warm skin of your lover? At home, atop your reasonably sized mattress, it might take as little as a sole of a foot pressed to the sole of a foot, as good as sorry, for the blame to be made deliquescent, divisible.

The American obsession with vast mattresses – California King, Texas King – how to repair over such an expanse? It must have some bearing on the divorce rates in this country. You’ve cracked it. You’ll write about it, for a Pacific magazine: the threat to intimacy posed by ostentatious furnishings, the correlation between acrimony and massive beds.

Crushed into your coat pocket are some erratic notes written on hotel stationery, scratched out by clock-radio light at 4 am, while your wife was on the other side of a memory-foam tundra. She feels nearly as far away now, on the other side of the table, refusing your eye. Perhaps still upset, perhaps simply exhausted, hungry. Her orphaned crusts are piled into a kind of brush fence. She has never been one to talk through a mouthful.

In the hotel, you’d allowed her the last word. Or, from her perspective, had abandoned her with it, allowed it to poison the already voluminous silence:

It’s not like you’re currently using your body for anything remarkable.

Your body. Well. You use it to run around in sometimes. It has taken you almost thirty-five years to coax it towards a design you are almost happy with. Most days, nothing aches anymore. There is a dancer’s strength in your legs (satisfying, although you still cannot dance). Your back finally has that little furrow down the spine, instead of a devilish bony ridge. (Fuller, your wife calls this, meaning bloodgutter, meaning the groove swaged into a dagger.) In recent years, you’ve taken to wearing bold, striking garments, no longer made anxious by the unsolicited admiration of strangers, of being pulled up in the street to receive praise. But how much of this is your wife’s doing?

And how much, the idea that the (heavily abridged) rustlings of your unquiet mind might amount to a creditable profession?

You make people up, she’ll reason. Why not do that more thoroughly? You know, flesh and blood. Cellular differentiation, she’ll add, in attempt to suffuse these words with undeserved magic.

You have seen me with plants, you might argue. You have seen me with sourdough culture, and goldfish ... (Here you might provide her with a litany of minor deaths, deficiencies of care. Up to and including the indoor pomegranate tree, which you forgot to take out of doors – for rain and for light  – before taxiing to the airport, and whose expensive leafless corpse will be the first thing to greet you upon return: Welcome home.)

Somehow, these various failures (v. American word), rather than exonerating you, only strengthen her resolve: parenthood will temper you. You will become the kind of person who habitually spritzes maidenhairs and sparrow orchids, monitoring direct lines of sun and ambient humidity.

I don’t want to be quiet of mind, you’ll say.

What the hell are you talking about? she’ll say.

Fine, you’ll tell her. But if we’re using my body, we’re using my eggs.

Well, that’s just selfish.

It’s economical. More ethical, really, if you consider medical resources – are you considering medical resources?

Then it wouldn’t be ours; it would just be yours.

Biologically. Is this a legality thing? you’ll ask. I’m not to be trusted?

You have it, then.

But there is the real and legitimate concern of how many real-life people depend upon your wife being properly slept and reasonably nourished, capable of making clear and imperishable arguments, in order to ensure the equitable pursuit of their own lives, the lives of their pre-existing, non-hypothetical children.

What you could say, the non-combustible truth, if you were brave enough to offer it: Lover, I am afraid.

What you say instead: I am not just going to incubate. Yes, you heard me. If you want to secure your bloodline so desperately ...

The argument follows more or less the same trajectory each run-through, typically culminating in each of you affecting to want a child a little less than the other, a little less than whatever might demand sacrifice in your life, lives.

Fine, she said, this morning, in the room with no view of the lake. I’ve still got a few years to work it out.

Age. She has years left, you do not. What used to be called a trump card, and now must be called an ace.

In the meantime, it’s not like you’re using your body for anything remarkable.

The same attributes that made your wife a formidable fighter have made her a proficient lawyer. She is not a malicious person. There is no terrible force that charges through her veins, darkening her blood. Her blood simply quickens, at will, with acute direction and purpose. Her ferocity follows a higher fluency, is meticulously checked and metered.

When her nose was busted for the second time, busted legitimately, she hung up her gloves without resentment. Some score had been settled – it wasn’t for others (for you) to understand. She was twenty-seven anyway. Time to lift her gaze beyond the ropes.

When you were twenty-seven, you spent most of your time appraising the lurid vinyl wallpaper of your sister’s caravan in rural South Australia, listening to snakes nesting behind the flat tires while you waited for the benzodiazepine to kick in, because there is no version of your life (better, best, or otherwise) in which your own blood does not darken with a terrible force. That would be someone else’s life altogether.

Your wife is built of sturdier stuff. Unperturbable. She could run on fumes for miles, days. Across the micro-universe of the diner table, she’s finally holding your gaze. Enough of an olive branch. What is it that makes the eyes appear to gain or recover lucency? She would tell you it’s a misperception, merely the ambient light.

She settles the bill, paying from the envelope of US twenties her mother gave the two of you as an eloping gift – Here’s to shared debt!

You leave, two hands for the coffee. All that is needed now is to put a little distance, a couple of hundred miles between yourselves and the room with no view of the lake, and the things that were said within it.

Otherwise, the river, the mist and geese traveling along it at varying elevations, varying speeds, southward. Otherwise, a townie child in a blue knit cap standing atop a Hollywood-red hydrant, demanding to be carried. Otherwise, the lozenge coloured leaves adorning the hire car. The vertiginous feeling of the cold snap in your lungs, of being out of season.

You set the coffee on the car roof and hold your hands up for the keys.

Your wife hesitates on the passenger side. But can’t we wait? she asks. Walk around a bit, spend a little more of this sun? We won’t beat the dark, anyway – it’ll be dark by the time we get on the Taconic.

For now, at least, the sky is the same blue as the plastic stretched drum-tight over the boats in the yacht club lot, over names you try to guess, wandering quietly through their ranks  – Hortensia, Wilhelmina, Boondoggle – voices low, as though these vessels might stir from their wintering and unwittingly crush you. Loose lips list ships. The yacht club road veers right where it meets the river, becomes gravel, becomes grassy ruts and no trespassing, water to one side, woods to the other, ramparted by raspberry canes and poison ivy receding from the cold. She goes ahead, holding most of the branches from whipping back into your face. She is dressed too lightly for this weather, but doesn’t show it. Discomfort of any kind – fear, pain, guilt, embarrassment – is an animal she keeps separate from herself. Something she can leave outside and neglect to feed.

You watch her moving along the trail. Her rangy grace, a sighthound’s lope. In your smaller moments, you are envious of her narrow shoulders, her boyish hips. With men, had you ever appreciated such things without envy? Hard to remember. With her it has been there from the first, though from the first she has forbidden such comparisons between yourselves. Seven years ago (whose party?) she was wearing a dress like slow liquid, a dark rippling fabric that feigned sliding off her at every slight turn. You complimented the dress by saying you could never get away with it. She laughed and said of course, of course you could.

You countered with all the reasons you could not – your proportions, your skin tone ...

But your future wife cut you off, her face stony. No, she said. This is not what we do. This is not how we get close to each other, by making ourselves seem defective enough to safely befriend.

You’d thought a person would have to be drunk to be so forthright. She was clear-eyed. You almost apologised, but stifled the urge.

Here, she offered, more gently. A few years ago I realised I’d stopped smiling in a way that hid my teeth. Now you go, your turn.

You told her that you had, at one point, truly hated your feet. What about them, exactly, you couldn’t recall. Only that you’d taken considerable measures to keep them hidden. But somewhere along the way, you must’ve stopped thinking about them. Here they were now, exposed, in open-toe sling-backs. Apparently innocuous.

There, that’s a start, she said, and sweetly bit your elbow. She had, you noticed with some annoyance, perfect teeth.

On the trail between woods and river you say little, and she less. But you pass through the same nets of oaky light, stumble over the same surfaced roots, muddy your city boots with the same forest-river mud. Something is lifting, being forgiven, by one or the both of you. Something is being resolved at a microbial level, being silently disassembled and carted away like a threatening foreign mass under an army of tiny diligent claws. It is enough, it is more than enough. You could go like this till dark and through it, wordlessly content. If it were warmer you might suggest a quick tumble in the poison ivy. But then the path opens into a clearing, littered with signs of use or misuse: half-buried plastic five-gallon, rusty propane tank, old ribbed-glass bottles, many beer and soda cans with ring-pulled mouths gaping in a style discontinued in the seventies or eighties. You kick through the strata of fallen leaves for any proof of the new millennium, of more recent visitors, but no.

Time slip, your wife says knowingly. The Catskills are full of them. I’ve read about it. Service stations that appear once and never again, where a tank of fuel costs six dollars and you can still buy RC Cola and Kamel Reds.

It won’t show up on film, then? you ask, reaching for your phone.

In pixels, you mean? You can try, but I bet your Instagram crashes.

It’s then that you notice the woman, standing on a narrow flank of pebbled beach, looking out across the river. Her lichen-coloured parka is modern enough, Dry-Tek or some such. She does nothing to acknowledge she’s heard you. How has she not heard you?

She has come here to howl, to howl unhindered; you know this before she opens her lungs and begins to do so. The sound agonied, agonising. And though you cannot know the root of the anguish, it is familiar to you. From the town, through the trees, the sound of bells. She has timed her bawling to the church bells, meaning, perhaps, that she has done this before, done this often. For how long has she done this – months? Years? Her hood is up, but she cannot be much older than your wife, than yourself. She has smooth, slender hands that are taut now, fingers splayed as though they too are emitting sound, or light. Terrible force.

Shouldn’t we see if–

But your wife touches her fingers to your wrist. She has a certain grace with grief, the grief of others. You have seen this, received it. She presses her palm flat between your shoulder blades and you turn together, away, back the way you came, towards the bells, walking abreast when the trail allows.

Dusk seeps from the ground up, obliterating the woods. A desperate, newly hollowed feeling, a draining away. In a neighbouring life, you’re the woman in the lichen-coloured coat, howling towards god-knows-what across the water, elegant hands rigid with pain.

Hey, you plead silently. Look at me.

Your wife turns, as if you’ve spoken. The last of the light. This morning, in the first of it: her crooked nose, her troubled brow, the glint of her still perfect teeth between her ragged lips. Here we are, you’d thought then, a fact at once miraculous and not, a deer appearing in a frozen salvage yard at midnight, tiptoeing between the moonlit wrecks.

And now, in this riverside town at the edge of the road map, watching your wife pull her coat to her chin in the passenger seat, you’re thinking it again: Here we are. An astonishment common to any love. Your blood quiet. A day in which you made the best of what little light there was, the first and last of it on your love’s face.

With eyes still closed she says, You’re watching me, aren’t you? I can tell. Stop watching me.

You want me to stop watching you?

No.

Okay.

As you flick the headlights up, the question arrives from somewhere outside your own questioning, more scent or frequency than language: When was the last time you wished for different? And the answer will be a very long way from reach.

'Anything Remarkable' appears in Josephine Rowe's new collection, Here Until August, forthcoming in September 2019 from Black Inc.