“Half in love”
Straight Man“Half in love” names an unstable middle ground in William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s account of attraction: more than a passing crush, but carefully distinguished from being fully in love. The phrase first appears as William tries to describe his feelings for other women to Tony Coniglia. It becomes a joke about percentages, a measure against which William’s marriage seems uncertain, and later a private refrain as he imagines death and the possible loss of Lily. Its final contrast is telling: when he sees Lily in Angelo’s arms, his affection is no longer described as half, but as nearly complete.
Naming Attraction
Asked whether he feels affection for other women, William searches for a word and settles on “crushes.” Tony treats this description as an opening for a philosophical reinterpretation, proposing that a crush might be intuitive knowledge of another person’s virtue and that attraction to virtue might ultimately be a desire to know God. William agrees outwardly, while recalling that his own attraction to Meg Quigley, whom he had looked down the front of that afternoon, seemed to have little theological dimension. The distance between Tony’s elevated account and William’s physical example keeps the discussion from settling into a single explanation of desire.
Tony then presses the distinction between attraction and love. William answers, “Maybe half in love.” The qualification matters: he neither denies the attraction nor claims that it amounts to a full commitment. “Half” lets him acknowledge an emotional possibility while keeping it at a distance, as though naming a fraction could make an unsettled feeling easier to handle. At the same time, the phrase is not a clean category. It leaves open what the other half would mean, or whether feeling can be divided so neatly at all.
Tony’s Percentile Rule
Tony takes William’s hesitant phrase literally enough to build a comic system around it. He summarizes that William is half in love with women other than his wife, then insists that half is legitimate and that anything above half would break the rule. His question about whether William is sure he has not reached fifty-one percent turns a complicated emotional distinction into a mock threshold. The joke gives William’s uncertainty a numerical form, but it also sharpens the issue: a single percentage point appears to separate permissible attraction from something more consequential.
William extends the arithmetic to his marriage. He reports Teddy Barnes’s judgment that he may only half-love his wife, and reasons that, if this is true, he loves the other women equally. Tony catches the conditional in William’s formulation, emphasizing that it remains an “if true” proposition. He then proposes a different standard for a wife: more than half, he concedes, and recalls having loved his own wife in the high ninetieth percentile. The exchange offers no objective way to measure love. Instead, its percentages expose how readily the men turn intimate uncertainty into a system of comparison, while the very precision of the system makes the uncertainty visible.
The Phrase Under the Shadow of Loss
Later, the half returns in William’s thoughts about mortality and the life he shares with Lily. He says that he does not want to die and does not want to hear that the asymmetry Phil Watson detected in his prostate is a tumor. Yet he admits that part of him would be thrilled by such news. He likewise does not want Lily to leave, but finds the prospect of her departure more affecting than the image of their growing old together and moving contentedly toward death. He can even half-wish for her to find an urgent new love, while recognizing that such a possibility would involve him too.
Tony’s joke has become an interior permission: “Half. I can hear Tony Coniglia whispering to me that I’m permitted half.” The repetition carries the earlier arithmetic into a moment when William is considering illness, separation, and his own death. It does not mean that he has decided he wants any of these outcomes; he explicitly says that he does not want to die or to lose Lily. Rather, the phrase gives form to conflicting responses he cannot reduce to a single wish. The half measures not just attraction but the uneasy coexistence of attachment and imagined loss: he wants the life he has, while finding himself moved by the thought of its disruption.
From Half to the High Nineties
The expression’s final contrast comes when William sees Lily turn away rather than look at Occam’s body, and Angelo take her in his arms. William describes his affection for her as being “right up there in the high ninetieth percentile, affection-wise.” The number recalls Tony’s account of loving his own wife in the high nineties, but here it marks William’s own response. The scene makes the affection newly immediate: seeing Lily receive comfort from Angelo brings William sharply into awareness of how much he feels for her.
William links this recognition to Teddy’s earlier warning that he had taken Lily for granted. That recollection places the moment in a longer marital history without making it a final resolution or a permanent measurement of their relationship. Instead, the shift from “half” to the high nineties gives the expression its arc. What began as a joking way to divide attraction becomes a means of registering emotional ambivalence, then yields to a moment in which William’s affection for Lily is emphatic. The percentile language remains comic in its precision, but the feeling it tries to quantify is not.
