Jane, a highly organized, efficient person, manages the Matthew Unger Center for Humanities, and Alan is a professor struggling with-and unable to complete-his latest book. The Mackenzies both work at Corinth University.
She’s not so much a wife as a nursemaid, and she realizes that she’s looking after a “giant toddler.” There’s a wedge firmly between the Mackenzies, and the situation is getting worse.
In turn, Jane’s horrified by the changes that have taken place in Alan. It’s as if acknowledging Jane’s caregiving role makes his helplessness a terrible reality. Alan refuses to acknowledge gratitude to Jane for the myriad tasks she performs daily to ease his pain and stress. Wallowing in self-loathing while struggling with depression, Alan thinks Jane pities him and he’s sick of her constant sympathetic apologies. Their formerly intimate companionship has gradually been replaced by nursing duties. Alan’s partial invalidism is not helped by his attitude, and he thinks nothing of leaving trails of food and crumbs in his wake with the expectation that Jane will clean up after him. The book begins with a typical hour at the Mackenzie house-with Alan arriving home and disrupting Jane’s activities with demands for ice packs, pillows, and juice. His admirable evenness of temper, optimism, and generosity of spirit had slowly begun to leak away,” and this change in Alan’s temperament while testing the wedding vow "for better or for worse" has stretched their formerly solid relationship to breaking point. Gradually “he had begun to change for the worse. While at first, Jane was a considerate nurse and caregiver, over time Alan has become peevish, demanding, difficult, and snappy. He’s put on weight, aged considerably, and is in constant pain. For the past 15 months, he’s consulted a number of doctors and therapists, and even undergone surgery. Middle-aged Jane Mackenzie and her husband Alan used to be happily married, but their relationship is now marred by Alan’s back injury. People are drawn to it like moths, they flutter frantically against the glass, and then the spotlight is turned off and they fall to the ground, scorched."
Of if you manage to interrupt her, then she turns her attention on you-her complete attention, like a high-powered spotlight, though usually not for long. When she’s working, she doesn’t notice anything that happens around her.
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