by Roger Salloch
Excerpted from Fiction Volume 7 Numbers 1 & 2 (1983).
Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Dryocopus pileatus, 1917.
A BIG MAN, he was curled uncomfortably on a small divan. A cast covered his left foot, a yellow sock covered his toes, a crutch lay beside him on the floor. His eyes were closed and except for a slight twitch that teased one corner of his mouth, he was lifeless and heavy, like stone.
His wife sat on the rug, beside the divan. She had a rose in her hand but she was not looking at the rose. She was staring at the fire. She did not move at all, her expression did not change, it was organized around a fixed kind of smile. One would not have called her stare vacant, but incomplete, or loose. She was looking at something inside herself, and when she stood up and went to the window the expression did not change.
The man opened his eyes. He could see her without moving his head. He might have been staring at something that was not there. He shut his eyes again for a long moment, then opened them. His wife had not changed her position. From where he lay he could see the tops of some trees and a preternatural glow along the summits of the Alps.
"I remember something you once told me," he said.
When she did not move he added, "Before we were married."
Still she did not move. He explained: "It was about happiness. You said you could remember the happiest moment in your life. You said it was one morning, you must have been eight, you came down to the kitchen, you were alone, and there was a ray of sunshine that filled your blue and white plate. Outside, you said, it was fall, the forest was crimson, you used the word 'crimson,' and there was a woodpecker with a red cap, upside down, pounding a hole in a birch tree. I remember, you said, in that instant you felt whole, you had a sensation of completion you never experienced again, and I remember, when I told you one of the happiest moments in my life had just occurred because you shared that memory with me, you didn't understand."
The man paused, then added: "When I think about you and Alex I tell myself it was like that. I tell myself you were looking for that same childlike sense of fulfillment. I tell myself you weren't with anybody after all. I tell myself you were alone."
His wife: "I thought you were asleep."
She held her head exactly as it was before. Against the white wash of the background she looked like a photograph of herself. Then, very slowly, she swiveled her head until her eyes came to rest on the man. Whether it was a conscious bit of theater or the involuntary betrayal of a secret distaste, the moment had a curious effect. It erased everything he had said. In the silence between them, it was as though he had never spoken at all.
The full story can be found in Fiction Volume 7 Numbers 1 & 2. Please follow the subscribe link for information on ordering.