The Piano Room
Wisp of a girl. My girl. My wisp.
Hardly that after twenty-five years, though she still has the small and shapely body. Still herself but, without him, not. Existing in a universe not fully hers but one that runs for miles, never intersecting with her own but contiguous to it and in most aspects related. A parallel universe. A person both herself and not herself living side by side in her apartment, wandering through rooms she recognizes but whose exact purposes, if asked, she could only guess at. A breakfast room for having breakfast in? Had they actually done that? Bacon and eggs on that glass table? A piano room for absorbing silence? Was that even sensible? She goes about, or someone very like herself goes about carrying out small domestic tasks whose precise meanings continually escape her. Watering plants, pulling sheets taut at the corners, dusting shelves, going round and round the sink with a sponge. Who could say why? Herself, but not herself doing that. A double always by her side and, like the peach satin armchair positioned just to her husband’s right and slightly behind, out of his direct line of vision.
Left! She’d been left?
Clearly, a mistake has been made. A mistake so ruinous as to now be beyond rectification.
*
But it is the morning of another day, ten months have passed since the day of silence, or is it a year? She must dress. Shower, do her hair, her face. A year already? Ten months? A thin black stroke on the upper eyelid, another on the lower. Leaning in close to the mirror, angling her head to get closer still. Raising the pencil, making the marks. Stretching the skin taut at the corners to keep the lines straight. Her eyes in the glass peer at themselves. Her eyes? Hers? So heavy lidded and with that startled, uneasy look?
She goes to the closet, opens the door, stands and stares. Flashes of her husband, already his features are fading, staring, stymied, befuddled, before a hastily opened refrigerator. Snatched open, she’d always thought, recalling his attack on the handle, his way of flinging open the refrigerator as if to catch its contents by surprise. Instead he’d been the one surprised, affronted, actually, finding nothing among all the foodstuffs within to satisfy cravings only seconds earlier intense, now strangely diminishing. There he was, left to stand at the door, a befuddled, stymied look on his face.
Left! As she was left?
She surveys the clothes hanging in the closet. Something casual would be her preference. Slacks and a T-shirt, even jeans. She still has the figure for them. Wisp of a girl. My girl. My wisp. But a suit is more suitable, and a silk blouse.
She is meeting another man for lunch. He will take her some place upscale and she must dress accordingly. They are meeting at his office. Offices are not her natural habitat. Law clerks, partners, third-year associates scurrying about. People confined to stations, desks, cubicles, working at the behest of some abstraction, a corporation, a company, or, as in Leland’s case, a firm. Voices buzz in a language she doesn’t recognize, go silent mid-sentence, mouths continuing to move, no sounds emerging. She doesn’t know where to put her arms, what to do with her hands. For twenty-five years her hands were a wife’s hands, a mother’s hands, working of their own accord, competently managing everything that came their way. But in an office they hang limply by her sides.
Never had she craved a career. You could if you wanted to, Jenny. You could do anything you set your mind to. But she had her husband, her son, her home. Why would she want anything else?