My student blushed all over his bald head as he confessed, laughing, “I have those adultery dreams — you know, the ones where you wake up in a cold sweat: Thank God, thank God, I didn’t mess up my whole life!” And I did know, for only that morning, in the hour before dawn peels back the first of her seventeen mauve-gray veils, I’d gotten wild with a young man half my age. I could taste his hard, wet mouth, so like the mouths of my youth: urgent, impatient, a little rough. Then he pulled a sheaf of fluorescent yellow condoms, a whole fluttering, connected stream of them, from the pocket of his slouchy jeans, and I awoke, shaken, in the faint light of 5 AM to the warm touch of my husband’s hand. Sometimes the dream saves us; sometimes we’re saved by waking from the dream; and some would say it’s all of a piece: the dream, the waking, the falling asleep again to wake an hour later in full sun and find coffee freshly made in the French press on the kitchen table with a little note alongside. Doll: thanks for putting up with me.