Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,23

the lighter from her hand, and used it to light up. He had started smoking Seven Stars a short time earlier. It was her husband’s brand. He had always smoked Hope regulars. Not that she had asked him to switch to her husband’s brand; he had thought of taking the precaution himself. It would just make things easier, he had decided. Like on the TV melodramas.

“I used to talk to myself a lot, too,” she said. “When I was little.”

“Oh, really?”

“But my mother made me stop. ‘A young lady does not talk to herself,’ she used to say. And whenever I did it, she got so angry! She’d lock me in a closet—which, for me, was about the scariest place I could imagine—all dark and moldy-smelling. Sometimes she’d smack me on the knees with a ruler. It worked. And it didn’t take very long. I stopped talking to myself—completely. Not a word. After a while, I couldn’t have done it if I had wanted to.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to this, and so he said nothing. She bit her lip.

“Even now,” she said, “if I feel I’m about to say something, I just swallow my words. It’s like a reflex. Because I got yelled at so much when I was little. But, I don’t know, what’s so bad about talking to yourself? It’s natural. It’s just words coming out of your mouth. If my mother were still alive, I almost think I’d ask her, ‘What’s so bad about talking to yourself?’”

“She’s dead?”

“Uh-huh. But I wish I had gotten it straight with her. I wish I had asked her, ‘Why did you do that to me?’”

She was playing with her coffee spoon. She glanced at the clock on the wall. The moment she did that, a train went by outside.

She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Both of them thought about wells for a little while.

“What do I talk about when I talk to myself?” he asked. “For example.”

“Hmm,” she said, slowly shaking her head a few times, almost as if she were discreetly testing the range of movement of her neck. “Well, there’s airplanes…”

“Airplanes?”

“Uh-huh. You know. They fly through the sky.”

He laughed. “Why would I talk to myself about airplanes, of all things?”

She laughed, too. And then, using her index fingers, she measured the length of an imaginary object in the air. This was a habit of hers. One that he had picked up.

“You pronounce your words so clearly, too. Are you sure you don’t remember talking to yourself?”

“I don’t remember a thing.”

She picked up the ballpoint pen lying on the table, and played with it for a few seconds, but then she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.

“You talk to yourself as if you were reciting poetry.”

A hint of red came into her face as she said this. He found this odd: why should my talking to myself make her turn red?

He tried out the words in rhythm: “I talk to myself / Almost as if / I were reciting / Po-e-try.”

She picked up the pen again. It was a yellow plastic ballpoint pen with a logo marking the tenth anniversary of a certain bank branch.

He pointed at the pen and said, “Next time you hear me talking to myself, take down what I say, will you?”

She stared straight into his eyes. “You really want to know?”

He nodded.

She took a piece of notepaper and started writing something on it. She wrote slowly, but she kept the pen moving, never once resting or getting stuck for a word. Chin in hand, he looked at her long eyelashes the whole time. She would blink once every few seconds at irregular intervals. The longer he looked at them—these lashes which, until a few moments ago, had been wet with tears—the less he understood: what did his sleeping with her really mean? A strange sense of loss overtook him, as if one part of a complex system had been stretched and stretched until it became terribly simple: I might never be able to go anywhere else again. When this thought came to him, the horror of it was almost more than he could bear. His being, his