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your secrets,” he began, leaning forward on the stage, “the ones you manage to conceal from everyone. Compared to your angel, your intimacy with your spouse is similar to your occasional dealings with a salesclerk. Are you here tonight with a husband, a wife? Look at that stranger beside you, so unable to challenge the secret knowledge of your angel.”
    Diane didn’t dare glance over at her relentlessly devout husband who had come here just because he loved to be appalled. All evening she’d had to pretend she was bored, but now the Angel Man seemed to speak directly to her, and Diane was afraid he saw past her false face and knew how stunned she was by his words.
    â€œRemember, to angels we are both storm and ballast,” Bradley said, anxious for even the barest flicker of interest on the woman’s face. “We’re a promising harbor for an angelic grip, but we are also the most turbulent of passages, the tightest of squeezes for an angel once it truly wants to slip inside us.”
    Diane watched the Angel Man, his face so peaceful in the spotlight. She thought of her husband’s angel: twisted in his heart, its wings crushed and worthless, its sad contortions resembling his fist on the table. She could sense him stirring angrily in his seat, aware of the attention she was receiving. She dreaded going home, where she was helpless before the unyielding injustice of his opinions, where even her dreams couldn’t escape the sound of his angry voice. She kept her face a blank.
    â€œWe’re sometimes too voluminously primitive,” Bradley continued, “a catalogue of imperfections, for angels to truly enjoy us. I sometimes wonder why angels hover beside us if we’re such an inexpressibly crude version of themselves, for they have more facets than we can imagine, each one lit by a light we can’t see. Perhaps our angels are prodigiously unfaithful, and they temporarily leave us, from boredom or exhaustion, to enter the mind of a new and excitingly unfamiliar human. Perhaps my own angel has done this. Perhaps it will someday leave me forever for someone new.”
    He stopped and stared at the woman’s stiff face. She isn’t even listening, he thought, at best she’s holding back a yawn. He looked out over the rest of the faces in the audience, but they all seemed to recede from him.
    Diane imagined his angel speeding toward her, whispering the sorts of secrets she had listened to all evening. The lone spotlight dimmed and she could just make out, “Whoever receives my angel, you’re welcome to every dogged attention it’s capable of, and may it give you better fortune than it ever gave me.” She looked up in gratitude, but the Angel Man had turned his back on her and the rest of the audience. As he walked offstage, Diane felt dangerously, deliciously weightless, and her lips tingled with forbidden words. And what could her husband do, she thought, if her words were not her own, how could he possibly reply if she howled out at him in an angelic rage? Already she saw him open-mouthed and speechless before her.
    Bradley stopped backstage, giddily empty, and he clung to the heavy folds of the curtain. He kept repeating to himself those last words, hoping to stave off his angel’s possible return. Through the curtain he could hear the rasp of chairs pushing back, murmuring voices, footsteps. He envied that crowd out there, leaving to return to their own lives. Then he thought, I’m the only life my angel has. And this seemed to be its own strange comfort, one that might forever help him to endure his companionable loneliness. But this insinuating idea also alarmed Bradley, and he checked an urge to describe the dark curtain, even though it shimmered along its length from his slightest touch.

Interior Design
    These days I just won’t get out of bed, so I lie here, idly kicking the sheets into strange patterns—a ripple of dunes, a