Nowhere, it would seem.
It's blank.
There's nothing there.
An empty space where there's an empty space.
It's as if my wife has stepped off the page and disappeared, like some character in a book who's killed off without warning.
Or perhaps she never left.
“Clara,” I say, but this time not to a pillow. “Clara,” I repeat.
If she's here, she doesn't answer.
I look at her Week-at-a-Glance again. But I've made no mistake. There is nothing written down for this evening. No name, no place, no time, no words.
It's blank. And what a strange and empty kind of silence this is. I would much prefer some man's name there and news she'll raise her skirt and rend her little pants to him, to this. I may be fool, but I have never worried losing her to someone else. Perhaps I have too little experience in these things. Perhaps I should assume the passion of a marriage cannot be contained and women dash like squirrels through the world in search of nuts to rest their chins upon.
Besides, I thrive on images of her in ecstasy. One's wife, particularly one so ophelimitous, deserves the universal
cock. And every husband worthy of the word will serve it up.
But Clara be untrue?
The question has no meaning. No matter what she does, she's true, for I accept her as she is. What else is marriage but such approbation? It has no greater truth.
But if she's nowhere, then she can't exist.
I wonder if I've dreamt her. Might I still be a man alone who doesn't speak except within his head and even there says nothing true?
What if I don't exist myself? It feels I don't. Is this what it means when people say, “Without you I am nothing”?
But if I don't exist, then why this emptiness? Since when can nullity be palpable?
Or is this blankness yet another of her codes? Has she left me? Is she hiding? Has the Earth itself dissolved and I float here in the whiteness of this piece of page?
I close and drop the datebook on the bed and listen to my voice: “Clara.”
Nothing.
“Clara.”
The same.
I go in search of her.
F
IRST HER BATHROOM
, where I don't really expect to find herâor, in fact, any evidence of her whereaboutsâbut which I've always wanted an excuse to visit. I've not set foot within this necessary, as they call it up north from whence hails our Star of Bethlehem, since I stood here with our architect and contractor and watched a muscular young man titivate these tiles by chafing microscopic specks of grout with sandpaper so smooth it might as well be chamois. I've never run from images of life's necessities
as they might be required of, or practiced by, my wife. Defecation, for all its fetid honks, is both sensual and cleansing, and Clara is not so verecund that she won't sit there with this door open and her elbows on her knees and address me standing at the door concerning this or that while in its midst. I hope that someday I shall stand at her feet in a delivery room and watch her open like a rose and, my bride and grume, spill forth the juice and blood of love and life. I have no fear of, or even distaste for, these bodily matters. Clara has taught me to accept the flesh. To do so is to find the way to heal the mind. There is no other. We are so beautifully constructed. Accept the flesh. Accept your limits. Love your mother.
Right now I must accept the fact that Clara's gone. Or at least not here in her bathroom.
I even pull aside the curtain of her bathtub, hesitantly, because I cannot help but see behind it what most I fear: her body drowned or bludgeoned, naked in her death. I have never understood why we flood ourselves with images of destruction. I am not a superstitious man. I don't believe I ward off fearful things by imagining them first. And yet I greet with considerable relief her bathtub empty, so much so that I sit down upon its lip and open each and every container she has lined up on its inner rim, shampoos, conditioner, bath salts, an uncorked, hand-blown, never-opened bottle of La Baignoire Graminaceous Foam Bath I had ordered for her by mail two years ago, and, in a box, lozenges that smell as if she's given them her scent.
Missing her intensely, I put each thing back precisely as I found it, rise, and look down into her bidet. I try to see my reflection in the slightly moist porcelain, yet I see nothing but a hair, a lonely, curly, lovely, precious little hair, fallen from my darling and, like me, most sad to be
apart from her. I nearly pick it up, but then I think, You're identifying with a pubic hair. I laugh and try to blow the thing away, but it sticks, it waits, like me.
I've been told that people love to look in other people's medicine cabinets. It's like looking through their skin, behind their masks, an expiscatory search beneath the surface of their lives for what can only be their weaknesses, their maladies, addictions, their suffering. And of course there might be pills to steal, those that slow you down or bring you sleep the most popularly pilfered, according to Clara, who continues to maintain, in her indirect justification of this lentitudinous life her husband leads, that what the sedulous truly seek is rest, is peace, is tranquil contemplation of the truth.
There are no such pills here. There are no grand discoveries to make of some disease or pain that she would hide from me. Only some expired Tylenol, generic calcium carbonate whose use I'm sure she keeps from me because it's occasioned solely by my cooking, and Midol for her menstrual cramps, a recent malady and one whose intensity, though brief, is quite severe and which I try to soothe from her by rubbing gently on her stomach while we listen to Julian Bream play Silvius Leopold Weiss and talk of anything but the pleasures of pareunia.
I am about to close the cabinet when I see a strange container that's shaped rather like a toilet seat. Its color reminds me most of the soft peach light from my mother's spelter lamp that bathed a nameless girl and me that night four years ago when first she taught me how to see her love herself and me to love myself and let her watch.
I open it and find a ring of empty, wizened plastic bubbles surrounding a dial imprinted with the days of the week. I count the days and find that each comes thrice.
Twenty-one days. Three weeks.
A Duane Reade, of all the provincial purveyors, prescription slip pasted to the inside top prescribes one tablet daily. The drug is, as is required, named: Ortho-Novum.
The
ortho
I know best is
orthography
, which is usually used to refer to proper spelling but whose antonym is
cacography
, a splendid word whose first meaning has not to do with spelling but bad handwriting. I would have thought, then, that Clara, to cure her own case of this malodorous
Kraut und Rüben
, might in fact be taking Caco-Novum. But no, it's Ortho-Novum, which, according to the description provided on a flimsy slip of paper by the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, consists of norethindrone and ethinyl estradiol.
I should know from the “estra” what I'm dealing with here. But I read on and learn that these are contraceptives, which, the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation informs me, have a failure rate of less than l percent.
I wonder whose they are until I read Clara's name above her gynecologist's, Dr. Leslie, on the prescription slip pasted to the cover of this ghastly device.
They are hers. Or were. All twenty-one of them, three weeks' worth, leaving seven days in which to bleed without meaning and thus complete the lunar month that so attaches women to the heavens.
The instructions from the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation confirm this: “After you have taken your last tablet, wait for seven days. During these seven days your period should begin.”
Clara is obviously clocking these matters. She notes within her Week-at-a-Glance that her period is late. But her periods don't last seven days. I should know. During them we limit sex to mouths and fingers, though less for
the sake of fastidiousness than variety. And sometimes, when she is bleeding or, as happened on one occasion, when she was diagnosed by her gynecologist to have an infection and was kind enough to put aside her shyness to so inform me, we abstain altogetherâtaking a breather, as this might so aptly be called. Can she possibly expect to bleed with the very dawning of the day after she's pushed the final pill from out the back of this peculiar pink contraption? Punctilious indeed.
What to make of this? She takes them not to have a child, or should I say, falsely chiastic once again, to not have a child.
But is it mine she doesn't want or someone else's? Better the latter. I'd rather the squelching of a child of mine be inadvertent than purposeful, even if this means she is untrue.
But I have recently determined that Clara cannot be untrue.
So what is happening here?
I don't know where my wife is.
And now I don't know if I know my wife.
I feel her gone. At the same time, I feel her leaving me, not merely in the usual way a wife leaves a husband but
leaving me
, emptying out from me, as if I had contained her but now she leaks away.
Is this what marriage is, the containment of the other, the inhabiting of one another's being, and when one leaves, the other one's as vacant as an empty house?
But this is what I wanted! To see her. Apart from me. Out there, naked and unmasked.
I know just where to look.
T
HE DOOR TO
her closet is not locked. I reach for the knob
the way one does after tredding on carpets in winter. But I feel no shock. Only excitement. I am not supposed to be here. This is forbidden.
I am in. Today's clothes lie on the floor at the portal. I see that the underpants she put on to go out were fresh.
Where to begin? My wife's closet is like her little house, a place her life resides no matter where she's gone. I stand here at its entrance and suffer what we rhetoricians call aporia. As language first and foremost seeks the truth, or should, no matter how disquieting the truth may be, I do the same.
It's her diaries I'm after, but I don't know where they are, and now I feel she's written on each and every object in this place.
It smells of her in here, her skin, her hair, the sweet breeze of her breath. I love her clothes and touch them where they hang. I shut my eyes and feel her in them and miss her terribly.
Her shoes, like mine, show little wear. But I go nowhere, and she is gone all day, my emissary to the world. So is she made of air? Or do the earth and pavement cradle her and not exact their normal toll? And might time do the same? Will I not get to see her old and shrunk and white and frail? I want her aged, in time. I want to see her close enough to see her change, and changed, I even want, as perhaps did Louis Althusser his own beloved wife, to see her dead, to know that part of her, to have her all, though I would also like to die before her, so I won't die of missing her. So I won't feel the way I'm feeling now.
I would dig my way through the wet, wormy earth to lie with her again.
But I want her on that bed out there. I want her back. And she has left me. I am here in her closet with her
clothes within my arms and my lips upon the bottoms of her shoes as if to glue her to my face.
I look through everything and find no diary. My fingers spider through her drawers. My hands raise dusty mist in the dark corners where they come upon the green, etched bottle that she's seemed to've saved from our first blessed night together in this place. My eyes leap from box to box and smart from mothball gas. This is archeology in pursuit of my own lost civilized self.
And now, once I've dug in everything and overturned each shard of Clara's broken life, I see, in absolute plain sight, piled across a table near the entrance to her closet, some scraps of quilt and each one covering a notebook.
I would like to think they've crept themselves from out some kame to mock my excavations, but I realize they were sitting here all the while, in plain sight, unhidden, to be near at hand for Clara to put down her days at night and waiting there for me as well to read upon a night like this when I was left alone, when I was left, when I had nothing left.
I chuckle at the mockery of itâyou dig until you bleed to ascertain the meaning of your life and then find out the truth is written on the back of your hand.
There are so many of these little books, each one quilted, no seeming order to their jumble. I touch one for the first time since the day I found one in the gutter and remember handing it to her and feeling her touch me through it. The memory of it now arouses me even more than the actuality of it then. Each time I touch her, no matter how many times, my desire to touch her yet again grows stronger. Love accumulates even as it is expressed and spent. As if that weren't paradox enough, it also tells me this: we have reached perfection together on the very
night she has disappeared off the page of our common life.
I pick up one of the thin books. It's covered with a piece of a quilt called Cross in the Square. I look into it. Her unthirlable hand opens to me once again. The pricks of her twisted letters scratch my eyes. I jump into the middle of her life, wherever that might be, for nothing here is dated, she merely lies across the pages, and start to read.
I go through periods when there's a piece of my body missing. It's not a limb or an organ. It's something that doesn't exist but that I need back. Orgasms rip me apart. They put me back together. But I don't want to have them alone. I need someone to watch me.
Tonight there were 2 of them.
Ron I've been with before.
Ron talked me into this. He said, “I want my friend to see you.”
“See me what?”
I knew what he meant. But Ron didn't know how to say it. Men are not good with words.
“I told him you
The door chimes. I throw down the book. It falls among its sisters, closed. I turn off the lights in her closet. Then I turn them on again. I've lost my place! Which book is it? A hundred scraps of quilt stare up at me.