600
PARTISAN REVIEW
locked him out again, and finally put his satchel outside the door, no, a
plastic bag, had rolled down the shutters and gone away on a trip, so as
not to have to see what happened. And now their relationship was on
the rocks, too. The woman: "I wish I were dead." The man: "Me, too."
The priest argued that dying was perhaps a kind of salto mortale,
after which a person landed on his feet again, entirely different feet; but
he got all muddled, began to stammer, fell silent; and then all three of
them sat there in silence; the couple wept.
The Taxham pharmacist seemed invisible, and when he asked for the
bill, he had to wave his arm several times. And when he said good-bye,
he did so in a language that the proprietor took for Spanish. Spanish?
He couldn't understand himself what he'd just said.
It
had been no lan–
guage at all.
As
HE PEDALED HOME
across the river valley on his wife's bicycle, which
was quite high, by the meadows, now pitch dark, he encountered a
strong smell of sweat, which turned out, as he rounded the bend, to
come from a squad of soldiers on a night march.
One of the families next door to him on the lane along the dike was
still sitting out on the verandah, and he chatted with them for as long
as it took him to open the garden gate (but the gate was unlocked, as
was always the case when his wife left the house); over the others'
hedge, their heads could hardly be made out.
In
one of his skylights–
was that a light shining? no, the reflection of a street lamp far off. And
something like a spiderweb attached itself to his face as he made his way
to the door and also indoors in the vestibule, as if he'd been gone much
longer than just for the day.
He switched the television on for just a second, during which a man
on the screen opened his mouth wide-and switched it off before he
could say a word.
As usual when he had the run of the entire house and was no longer
restricted to his own living quarters, he didn't know where to go; he had
trouble finding his place. So long since he'd been in his wife's rooms–
since the last time she went away for a while. And now he wandered
back and forth there in the dim light-every other lightbulb was burned
out-and then noticed that he was instinctively looking for a message
or a sign intended for him. But there wasn't even a trace of their shared
past, unless he counted, half hidden, a tiny picture of their son, taken in
a photo booth and pasted into a panoramic landscape, barely visible in
the crown of a tree, with his head pointing down, no less, like a rebus.
