"Jesus Christ, what happened?" I assumed that he had gone to the City Club after an argument with Patrice, and that he had knocked back five too many and couldn't survive the Breathalyzer. But I was wrong.

"It's awful," he said, and I could tell that he was crying real, anguished tears. Suddenly and with unnerving clarity, he whispered, "I feel so awful, I thought about tying off a bed sheet . . ." but then his voice trailed off.

"I'll be there in forty minutes. Are you good for that long?"

He said he thought so. By the exhausted resignation in his voice I felt reasonably certain that the suicidal impulses had passed and that he was now rounding the bend into that stage of dread that accompanies savage transgressions against a loved one. I knew before I even hung up the phone that Jurgen had beaten his wife, though I don't know precisely how I knew -- I had no reason to convict my good friend of such a heinous crime.

As a fellow English instructor at a local college, Jurgen had become one of my closest friends. I had met him at a critical juncture in his life, when he was weighing heavily the costs of separating from Patrice. In the ensuing weeks we talked frequently about his feelings of guilt and inadequacy, both as a lover to his wife and an apostatized member of the Mormon church. "I'm glad I went on that mission before I left the church," he often said. "I learned Dutch and got the hell out of Ogden. I'd be managing the spark plug counter at some auto parts store if I hadn't gone. I swear to God I would."

But he was just as proud of the trip he made to Europe two summers later to study world literature. He talked about that journey perhaps even more. He dwelled particularly on the time when he had run out of money, his parents having no more to lend. He had stowed away on a Greek freighter bound for France, lived in a park, and swept out shops for food and wine. He saw those six months as the highlight and real turning point of his terribly naive and sheltered life. This was our common ground: I have never considered myself a particularly religious man, but I have felt the almost transcendental ecstasy that comes with packing five or six big bags and flying over the polar cap, heading toward a year of the glorious unknown.

While Jurgen foraged for his supper across the Channel, I was tucking myself away daily in a private pub inside London's Senate Library, steeping in warm Guinness. And if my sojourn had changed me at all -- which it had, in more ways than I care to go into -- his must have crumbled the timbers of his convictions. He came back to the States with the hunger of a defrocked monk, and moved out of his parents' home, painting houses to settle his undergraduate tuition; after work, he'd scatter most of his paycheck at one of the few drinking holes in Ogden, Utah.

That's when he met Patrice. As he told it, she was the first woman he had ever picked up from a bar. And she was still a virgin, which made him happy. "It would have been a quick date if she'd had anyone to compare me with," he had said on more than one occasion. She carried heavy baggage, but he accepted the troubled package with a Stoic's resolve.

Jurgen and I had become friends during our first summer session at the college, sharing an office and talking whenever we could about the stories of Raymond Carver, whose grim vision we both understood intrinsically. As new faculty, we were both teaching an extra load to pay off our student loans. It was on one of these warm July mornings that Jurgen called to tell me that his two-year-old bullmastiff had drowned in a canal while jogging alongside Patrice the previous evening -- a ritual he resolutely believed had helped his wife retain a fragile sanity during their young marriage. It was during that phone call that I first heard him cry, and I believe the rush of emotion had more to do with his fear of their future than the death of that sweet dog. "I'm all right," he said at the time, "but I don't know what Trice is going to do. She loved that dog like a kid." And it was hard not to: the brute stood about a yard high at the shoulder and its food bills ran higher than most orthodontics. It rode everywhere with Jurgen, seated stately in the front seat of his catshit-yellow convertible Volkswagen like a proud granite statue. Patrice stopped carrying Mace when the dog was a few months old, and Jurgen had said he felt so secure with the jowl passenger that he was tempted to drop the theft clause on his auto insurance.

About a half mile from their home, the dog had become thirsty and wrested the leash from Patrice's grip. Later, Patrice said she had frozen, unable to move, as the dog lost her footing on the silty lip of the drainage canal. Even later Patrice said she thanked God that the dog hadn't looked at her as she splashed into the water and was carried in a rush through a steel porthole and down into the bowels of an Ogden city aqueduct. "She couldn't have dealt with the eyes," Jurgen had told me. "God, the poor dog must have been terrified."