not so far back when her smile could blind me. I’d loved her then, or believed I did, and never doubted the choices that I had made. Back then, she was so confident in the rightness of us, and spoke of our future with a passion that felt prophetic. She said that we would be the perfect couple, that we would have the perfect life; and I’d believed her. She’d made me her disciple, showed me the future through her eyes, and it was dazzling and bright.
That was a long time ago, but even now I could close my eyes and see a yellowed shadow of that vision. It had seemed so easy.
I brushed the resin of a southern spring from the step and patted the broken tile. She bent slowly, and when she sat, forearms on her knees, I thought I saw the old love flutter in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and looking at her, I thought she meant it.
For an instant, my throat closed, and I felt that if I let the words out, the tears might follow. Instead, I gestured once more at the dwindling figure of my park walker and said again, “Isn’t he magnificent?”
“Oh Jesus, Work,” she said, getting back to her feet. “He’s a horrible old man, and I wish he’d stop walking past our house.” She stared at me as if at a stranger, and I had no words for her. “Damn it. Why do you have to make it so hard? Just take your beer and sit out back. Will you do that for me, please?”
As she stalked into the house, I rubbed at my face. Until then, it had never occurred to me that the man was old, and I wondered why my wife had picked up on the fact while I had not. I watched as he moved down a grassy bank to the shore of the small city lake that was the heart of the park, then faded into the playground, which seemed to grow smaller each passing year.
Inside, the house was cold. I called to Barbara, got no answer, and so moved into the kitchen for a beer that I knew better than to drink yet planned to anyway. I saw Barbara through the door to the living room, hunched over the paper, a glass of white wine untouched beside her. Rarely had I seen her so still.
“Anything in the paper?” I asked, my voice sounding small even to my own ears.
I carried my beer into the well of her silence and sat in my favorite chair. Her head was bowed; her skin shone pale as Ezra’s bones and a still darkness filled the hollows of her cheeks. When she looked up, her eyes were red and getting redder. Her lips seemed to have thinned, and for a moment she looked scared, but then her eyes softened.
“Oh, Work,” she said, tears leaking out to slide like oil down the high planes of her face. “I am so sorry.”
I saw the headline then, and felt it odd that she could cry while I could not.
That night, as I lay in bed waiting for Barbara to finish in the bathroom, I thought of the newspaper article and the things it had said and left unsaid. It portrayed my father as some kind of saint, a defender of the people and pillar of the community. This brought my mind again to truth as a concept, and the naked subjectivity of something that should be pure essence. My father would have found the article a fitting epitaph; it made me want to vomit.
I stared through the window at a night made beautiful by a waxing moon, turning away only at the sound of Barbara’s self-conscious cough. She stood transfixed, pinned between the moon and a soft spill of light from the bathroom closet. She wore something filmy that I had never seen, and her body was a ghost beneath it. She shifted under my scrutiny and her breasts moved in unison. Her legs were as long as always, yet they seemed more so tonight, and the darkness of their joining pulled my eyes down.
We’d not had sex for weeks, and I knew that she offered herself thus from a sense of duty. Strangely, that moved me, and I responded with a hard, almost painful need. I didn’t want a wife just then. No communication. No feeling. I wanted to wall myself in soft flesh and pound the reality of this