For three years, Joy had been vigorously single, running through a series of men with little patience or enthusiasm. Scott had just ended a two-year relationship with a sweet, kind, wet paper towel of a woman who left him horrified of his tendency to inflict pain unto the very people he claimed to love most. But the friends, charged by that bored meddling impetus unique to the married, persisted until Scott and Joy decided OK, fine, whatever, just please shut up.

Scott had a farmboy's charm, and somehow managed over that first drink to tell a not-totally-tasteless joke about anal sex, which to Joy was no small feat. Joy carried herself with a standoffish cool that made Scott feel small for the first time in a long time. And there were moments between them, fleeting at first, that were in a simple and undeniable way just very, very good. A coincidence of fears and passions, eloquent silence, laughter. She made him laugh hard enough to snort a little, and he was not embarrassed by the snort, and she smiled at his lack of embarrassment, which in turn made him smile even wider. And this became the model for those first cautious months, these moments linking together, gaining momentum.

They were not superheroes. There were minor mutual dishonesties, brushes with temptation. But once they called it "love" they found they loved more for each weakness, confession and recovery, their momentum compelling them closer. They moved into an apartment and rescued a dog named Chester. They acquired furniture and painted walls, while around them seasons changed.

And it was one late-summer evening while preparing dinner that Scott glanced through a kitchen window and caught the last bit of sun going down across rooftops, and he stood watching as light became gray, and eventually dark. In the living room, Joy too happened to watch the changing light, and was likewise given pause, but for a different reason. What Scott saw was a day giving way to night as if exhausted, and he took comfort in this idea, a tired day that could only light the world for so long. Joy, on the other hand, watched darkness spread and imagined night dropped like ink into the day's water, and was taken by the force of night's invasion of the helpless day. And because they were in love, and because lovers share, they met in the hallway.

But here something went awry. Without intention, sharing somehow bled into arguing -- over the role of day, the invasiveness of night -- and this argument achieved its own momentum toward collision. Screaming about days and nights led to a flood of vicious insults, pointing and slandering with intent to harm. Chester barked out of confusion. As the fight grew it spread outward, to the world they had created. Joy ravaged bookshelves and tore paintings from walls. Scott opened cabinets and threw wineglasses to the floor. They went about the obliteration of their home like a long rehearsed dance: toppling dressers, ripping plants from their pots while Chester's stumpy tail wagged, oblivious. And as time passed and they saw what they were doing, the fight worsened for their consideration of it, anger about the fight fueling anger for the fight. Both were livid, sickened that the world they'd built from nothing could be destroyed at such whim. Hammering, tearing, and suspecting that at some level the fight had to be racial, didn't it, and wondering, once the destruction was finished, how they could possibly still love each other having seen what they'd done, and knowing what they now knew.

When police finally arrived they found the apartment door hanging crooked on its hinges. Stepping over broken glass and demolished furniture and chunks of drywall, lighting flat in pre-dawn dark, they came upon Scott and Joy huddled naked together on the floor beneath the living room's east-facing window, clutching each other as if for warmth, fingernails dug into bodies shiny with sweat as they stared toward the first break of day. At their side lay Chester, black snout crusted white with the salt he had licked from their skin.

Officially, the incident would go on file as a "Domestic Disturbance," a term at which the married couples laugh, and call deeply redundant.

TRUMPED OUTRIGHT

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