Falling
Jenny Wales Steele
We
pause. This plastic cabinet, a display
of ancient carvings, black stone and jade.
Birds of prey, jaguars. Intricate
detail of wing, of tooth. A hushed
atmosphere in this museum, only the hiccoughs of static on a guard’s
walkie-talkie and the murmurs of other people getting a dose of culture. Always other people. I pinch Eric’s wrist, the pulse in it. He turns to me. His eyes, those gray eyes, are savage but
merciful. “Yes,” he says.
* * *
Modern methods of classification. So, I classify myself: widow. A widow in the widowhood, on the corner of dread and despair. My husband died. People ask when, but never how. Out of courtesy, I suppose, or out of respect, though I have no use for either. Maybe I’m expected to tell without any prompt. But I never tell because it seems a dull death. I imagine other deaths for Peter. Dramatic scenarios. That Peter jumped into a flooded river to save a drowning child. That Peter interrupted a mugging and was knifed. That Peter was electrocuted while reaching for a kitten trapped in a fuse box. But his death had no drama. He was on a ladder and he lost his balance and he fell and he snapped his neck. It was a Saturday morning in April. We had slept in, made sleepy love. The neighbor’s lawnmower was as if a dirge. We discussed a trip to Italy. We had blueberry muffins. I put on track pants and a comfy sweatshirt. I had a stack of essays to get through: the meaning of Jane Austen. Peter decided to scoop out the gutters. I was jotting a comment in red ink when a dark shape swooshed through the sunlight. The shadows of the rungs of the ladder slid across my desk. Thump, clatter. “Peter?” I found him crumpled on the narrow path along the side of our house. Dead, so simply. I knelt to him. If I screamed, I can’t remember. How an ambulance was summoned, I can’t remember. I remember a nurse talking (to me?) about a cube of suet she had put on her patio, how it had attracted a trio of orioles.
* * *
“My husband is dead.”
“When?”
“Six months ago. In April.” Thump, clatter.
Eric was leading me through an exhibit of pre-Columbian artifacts. “And what happens now, Kate? I mean, how are you now?”
“Calculating.”
“Funny. You always were funny.”
“A hoot, in fact.”
Sculptures of warriors with plumed helmets. I imagined virgins tipped into volcanoes. I imagined beating hearts cut out of bodies. I imagined Peter’s heart cut out.
* * *
I came to Denver to visit my sister-in-law. Carla had insisted and it seemed sincere. Patting my knee during that breezy, bright green hour at the cemetery. She and her family had flown to Ohio for Peter’s funeral. Husband and children occupied themselves or maybe I never noticed them. Carla cooked and scrubbed and mopped and aired. “Let’s air out this house!” Why not mess and filth and chaos instead? Why not dank and fusty? What my mood was. But Carla wisely avoided the small room with my desk and shelves of books and untouchable clutter. I spent all my time there, in my wingback chair (crumbs and dust and the stink of myself in its seams). I read novels, anything with carriages and suitors and witty dialogue. Carla accused me of wallowing. “That’s a highly literary observation, Carla.” She didn’t speak to me for half a day.
I was teaching at a community college. I excused myself. A leave of bereavement. A phrase that fills the mouth. There was already a substitute for me. The new guy. Bashful, anxious. He fetched my lesson plan and that batch of essays I had been correcting. He said, “I have a crush on you, Mrs. Wilson.” I had no reaction to this. Mrs. Wilson, indeed. Maybe I should have hinted at a tryst. In a carriage, with witty dialogue, with me in my reeky bathrobe and bunny slippers. I suppose that I was gawking weirdly at him. He blushed and hurried away.
Carla observed me, assessed me. I let her. Let her censor or pity my uselessness. “Do you want to keep these?” Item after item she hauled out. Squash rackets. Neckties. The humidor. I had a husband who played squash. I had a husband who wore neckties. I had a husband who smoked cigars. I had no need of these souvenirs. Carla donated all of it to charity.
Peter was Carla’s only sibling, her baby brother. They were hostile to one another as children. She was a sullen girl, not amused with his antics, his taunts. Their father was cruel, their mother was morose. How not to mimic their parents? But in adulthood, Carla and Peter had a truce. She let loose of old slights, she accepted how mellow and sweet he had become. “We came through it, didn’t we, Peter?” I remembered this when I caught her sobbing one evening. She was leaning in the pantry. Loud, bodily sobbing, getting it out all at once, as efficient with her grief as she was with everything else. I lingered, unseen, until I deliberately bumped a kitchen chair. “We’re having lamb for dinner,” she said. “Don’t you have any mint sauce?” I blinked at her. I was sadly lacking in mint sauce.
* * *
I’ve become strange, spooky. My clothes are in dark tones, black, maroon, charcoal, a contrast to my chalky pallor. I drift around campus, class to class. Students waylay me. They emote. Their little feelings funneled into 19th century poems. One girl, the sighing type, confiding to me, “Isn’t it so lovely how Keats understands love?” Adorable. Colleagues beckon me to cocktails or to faculty shindigs, but I decline. No doubt they’re secretly relieved. I’m too raw. I’ve not completely adapted to the empty house, empty bed, empty days.
Carla phones now and then. This puzzles me, but I chat with her. Until she gets into advice mode. Join a gym, Kate. Learn to knit, ski, waltz. Shouldn't I learn to rage instead? To burn? To ravage? She glides into her advice and suddenly I claim: soup boiling, doorbell. But she again urged her invitation to Denver and I decided why not.
“I’ve scheduled manicures tomorrow.” Carla was sitting on the twin bed in the guest room where she put me. “And then we’ll have lunch. Shopping too.” I was listening to her, not listening to her. I slipped out of my gypsy skirt and unbuttoned my blouse. There was a silver bowl on the bureau, a smeary reflection of my throat in it. I unhooked my bra. “Oh,” said Carla. “I’ll leave you. No hurry.”
I needed a soak. I filled the tub. The reflection of my hand in the chrome taps. The reflection of one shin in the faucet. Shards of myself.
“I’m sorry, Carla. I am.” After three days with her, I had to bow out. Madness creeping into me. Because of her tidily labeled Tupperware. Her green bean casserole. Her chore chart. Her children’s bad art. Her bland husband smiling, smiling, smiling towards me. All of this normalcy. “You’re silly, Kate.” She was scouring a skillet. Wrinkled bits of omelet floated in the sink. She glanced towards me. Sudden vehemence in her voice. “You’re a silly woman.” I had no quarrel with this. I shrugged. “I’ll take you to the airport. It’s no trouble.” But it’s trouble I crave, Carla. The meaning of Kate Wilson. I called a taxi.
In the museum’s entrance was a coat check where I put my suitcase. I paid the admission fee and followed the map to the pre-Columbian exhibit on the third floor. Eric was standing alongside a column of blocks, salvaged remnants of a temple. He walked directly towards me, into me. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
* * *
We had been in the same line, going through the same security checkpoint at the Cincinnati airport. I was putting my flats into a plastic bin when I heard my name. I turned. There was a young woman with a fidgety baby. A man behind them. Was this Eric? With wife and child. But I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade. “Kate! It’s me!”
The line surged and split. The mother and baby were not with him. I stepped through the security arch and collected my things. I waited as Eric came through. A buzz sounded and security personnel gestured him back. It was his belt buckle, heavy silver, entwined serpents. He unbuckled it and pulled the belt from the belt loops of his jeans. How this made our nights together flash through my mind, my body. Those nights of what we had years ago.
We were in school, graduate students, Ohio State. Mutual friends introduced us. A loud party. Music throbbing. We shouted at one another. That’s how I remember our first few moments. Shouting our outlines. Literature! You?! Anthropology! Apology?! No! Anthropology! Oh! Great! What’s your name again?! Eric! He gestured me out of the party, into a less noisy alley. Hi. Hello. Physical, intellectual attraction. He was cool, sensual, deft. We scheduled ourselves around one another, though what we had was slack, without commitment. This was good and right. We were both focused on our degrees. But Eric had a crisis, a seizure. Mid-bite of a tuna melt, suddenly on the floor of the cafeteria, writhing. Scans proved no cause, no blot or kink in his brain. But his idea of the world had skewed. It included the idea he had of me. So we ended what we had, who we were together. He had been on short trips to Mexico, expeditions to sift through ruins, but he needed to go there, move there, be there. I was not going to miss him. I had not taken him to heart. I accepted a job in Cincinnati. I met Peter within a year. The patio of a crowded Starbuck’s. Is this taken? Indicating the empty chair at my table. A tall man, but not too tall. I was reading a chapbook, a colleague’s poems about a sharpened pencil, a chipped teacup, the memory of an aunt’s breath. I tucked the chapbook into my satchel. A ladybug settled on the lid of my latte and crawled into the sip hole. This man thumbed the lid away and freed the ladybug. I marveled. This gentleness. “My name’s Peter.” It began that simply. Brown hair, narrow jaw. Necktie. He was almost handsome, almost sexy. It was this quality of almost that charmed me. He was a draftsman. I wasn’t sure what that was, but it sounded so solid. He wooed me cautiously, politely. It was a courtship. We slept together, fit together. Calmly. We fell in love. We married, without ceremony, without fuss, in the city courthouse. We found a pretty house on a pretty street. Maple trees. Trimmed lawns. Neighbors who waved hello. Neighbors with Volvos and schnauzers. We considered children, but edgily. A hesitancy there. His glum childhood. My childhood too, if less dismal. Peter and I had one another and this was plenty. And then he was dead, not long after our eighth anniversary.
* * *
In the din and swirl of the airport, I took an inventory of Eric, of his body. Lean, taut. That same dark hair. That same boyish elegance. He put on his cowboy boots, his belt. “Kate.” We embraced. That same woodsy scent. “Where are you going?”
“Denver.”
“So am I.”
He slung a gigantic backpack across his shoulders. This backpack was battered, dusty, thoroughly used. I wondered if his entire existence was in it, if it held all of the pieces of who he was now. This backpack in ancient jungles, cheap hostels, jostled in the back of ramshackle trucks.
We were actually on the same flight. We sat in the boarding area together. He had been in Cincinnati to lecture at a symposium. About Aztec doodads and whatnots. “Modern methods of classification.” I nodded. Suddenly shy, dumb. “And you, Kate? Married? Kids? Teaching?”
“Teaching, yes. Married too.” It seemed true when I said this, as if Peter was home. Or just getting home after a game of squash. I heard the screen door bang. I heard keys tossed onto the kitchen counter.
On the plane, Eric was a dozen rows ahead of me. I could see one elbow. I was reading Vanity Fair, an article about glamorous crooks, but my eyes drifted to that elbow. He strolled back to where I was seated. He lingered. I noticed a pale scar under his chin, a scar I hadn’t known. “Excuse me, sir.” The beverage cart. Eric went back to his seat. Across the aisle, a woman in lilac polyblend winked at me. “An old flame?” Flame, inflamed, flammable. I imagined another death for Peter. A hijacked plane, a bomb strapped around a fanatic’s hips, an explosion above Kansas, charred bodies culled out of a cornfield.
“I’m at the museum every day. Come in if you get a chance.” We trudged through the Denver airport. All these people going somewhere. Eric came with me out to the curb where Carla was idling in her Cherokee.
I had no words for Eric. I was teetering. Carla tapped her horn. A judging horn. I wheeled my suitcase towards her. Eric vanished. “Who was that, Kate?”
“A coincidence. My coincidence.”
“Oh.” Such suspicion carried in that oh. On the way to her house, she blathered about the weather. “Chilly! Hope you packed a coat.” Her son’s soccer team. “The Hornets! They’ve got the cutest uniforms.” Her daughter’s grades. “She’s a math whiz!” I made the appropriate noises, coo and wow, but in a niche in my mind was Eric unbuckling his belt.
* * *
Animals of black stone and jade. I pinch Eric’s wrist. “Yes,” he says. Thump, clatter. I’m unbalanced. I’m falling. Eric’s yes breaks my fall.
* * *
Modern methods of classification. So, I classify myself: widow. A widow in the widowhood, on the corner of dread and despair. My husband died. People ask when, but never how. Out of courtesy, I suppose, or out of respect, though I have no use for either. Maybe I’m expected to tell without any prompt. But I never tell because it seems a dull death. I imagine other deaths for Peter. Dramatic scenarios. That Peter jumped into a flooded river to save a drowning child. That Peter interrupted a mugging and was knifed. That Peter was electrocuted while reaching for a kitten trapped in a fuse box. But his death had no drama. He was on a ladder and he lost his balance and he fell and he snapped his neck. It was a Saturday morning in April. We had slept in, made sleepy love. The neighbor’s lawnmower was as if a dirge. We discussed a trip to Italy. We had blueberry muffins. I put on track pants and a comfy sweatshirt. I had a stack of essays to get through: the meaning of Jane Austen. Peter decided to scoop out the gutters. I was jotting a comment in red ink when a dark shape swooshed through the sunlight. The shadows of the rungs of the ladder slid across my desk. Thump, clatter. “Peter?” I found him crumpled on the narrow path along the side of our house. Dead, so simply. I knelt to him. If I screamed, I can’t remember. How an ambulance was summoned, I can’t remember. I remember a nurse talking (to me?) about a cube of suet she had put on her patio, how it had attracted a trio of orioles.
* * *
“My husband is dead.”
“When?”
“Six months ago. In April.” Thump, clatter.
Eric was leading me through an exhibit of pre-Columbian artifacts. “And what happens now, Kate? I mean, how are you now?”
“Calculating.”
“Funny. You always were funny.”
“A hoot, in fact.”
Sculptures of warriors with plumed helmets. I imagined virgins tipped into volcanoes. I imagined beating hearts cut out of bodies. I imagined Peter’s heart cut out.
* * *
I came to Denver to visit my sister-in-law. Carla had insisted and it seemed sincere. Patting my knee during that breezy, bright green hour at the cemetery. She and her family had flown to Ohio for Peter’s funeral. Husband and children occupied themselves or maybe I never noticed them. Carla cooked and scrubbed and mopped and aired. “Let’s air out this house!” Why not mess and filth and chaos instead? Why not dank and fusty? What my mood was. But Carla wisely avoided the small room with my desk and shelves of books and untouchable clutter. I spent all my time there, in my wingback chair (crumbs and dust and the stink of myself in its seams). I read novels, anything with carriages and suitors and witty dialogue. Carla accused me of wallowing. “That’s a highly literary observation, Carla.” She didn’t speak to me for half a day.
I was teaching at a community college. I excused myself. A leave of bereavement. A phrase that fills the mouth. There was already a substitute for me. The new guy. Bashful, anxious. He fetched my lesson plan and that batch of essays I had been correcting. He said, “I have a crush on you, Mrs. Wilson.” I had no reaction to this. Mrs. Wilson, indeed. Maybe I should have hinted at a tryst. In a carriage, with witty dialogue, with me in my reeky bathrobe and bunny slippers. I suppose that I was gawking weirdly at him. He blushed and hurried away.
Carla observed me, assessed me. I let her. Let her censor or pity my uselessness. “Do you want to keep these?” Item after item she hauled out. Squash rackets. Neckties. The humidor. I had a husband who played squash. I had a husband who wore neckties. I had a husband who smoked cigars. I had no need of these souvenirs. Carla donated all of it to charity.
Peter was Carla’s only sibling, her baby brother. They were hostile to one another as children. She was a sullen girl, not amused with his antics, his taunts. Their father was cruel, their mother was morose. How not to mimic their parents? But in adulthood, Carla and Peter had a truce. She let loose of old slights, she accepted how mellow and sweet he had become. “We came through it, didn’t we, Peter?” I remembered this when I caught her sobbing one evening. She was leaning in the pantry. Loud, bodily sobbing, getting it out all at once, as efficient with her grief as she was with everything else. I lingered, unseen, until I deliberately bumped a kitchen chair. “We’re having lamb for dinner,” she said. “Don’t you have any mint sauce?” I blinked at her. I was sadly lacking in mint sauce.
* * *
I’ve become strange, spooky. My clothes are in dark tones, black, maroon, charcoal, a contrast to my chalky pallor. I drift around campus, class to class. Students waylay me. They emote. Their little feelings funneled into 19th century poems. One girl, the sighing type, confiding to me, “Isn’t it so lovely how Keats understands love?” Adorable. Colleagues beckon me to cocktails or to faculty shindigs, but I decline. No doubt they’re secretly relieved. I’m too raw. I’ve not completely adapted to the empty house, empty bed, empty days.
Carla phones now and then. This puzzles me, but I chat with her. Until she gets into advice mode. Join a gym, Kate. Learn to knit, ski, waltz. Shouldn't I learn to rage instead? To burn? To ravage? She glides into her advice and suddenly I claim: soup boiling, doorbell. But she again urged her invitation to Denver and I decided why not.
“I’ve scheduled manicures tomorrow.” Carla was sitting on the twin bed in the guest room where she put me. “And then we’ll have lunch. Shopping too.” I was listening to her, not listening to her. I slipped out of my gypsy skirt and unbuttoned my blouse. There was a silver bowl on the bureau, a smeary reflection of my throat in it. I unhooked my bra. “Oh,” said Carla. “I’ll leave you. No hurry.”
I needed a soak. I filled the tub. The reflection of my hand in the chrome taps. The reflection of one shin in the faucet. Shards of myself.
“I’m sorry, Carla. I am.” After three days with her, I had to bow out. Madness creeping into me. Because of her tidily labeled Tupperware. Her green bean casserole. Her chore chart. Her children’s bad art. Her bland husband smiling, smiling, smiling towards me. All of this normalcy. “You’re silly, Kate.” She was scouring a skillet. Wrinkled bits of omelet floated in the sink. She glanced towards me. Sudden vehemence in her voice. “You’re a silly woman.” I had no quarrel with this. I shrugged. “I’ll take you to the airport. It’s no trouble.” But it’s trouble I crave, Carla. The meaning of Kate Wilson. I called a taxi.
In the museum’s entrance was a coat check where I put my suitcase. I paid the admission fee and followed the map to the pre-Columbian exhibit on the third floor. Eric was standing alongside a column of blocks, salvaged remnants of a temple. He walked directly towards me, into me. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
* * *
We had been in the same line, going through the same security checkpoint at the Cincinnati airport. I was putting my flats into a plastic bin when I heard my name. I turned. There was a young woman with a fidgety baby. A man behind them. Was this Eric? With wife and child. But I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade. “Kate! It’s me!”
The line surged and split. The mother and baby were not with him. I stepped through the security arch and collected my things. I waited as Eric came through. A buzz sounded and security personnel gestured him back. It was his belt buckle, heavy silver, entwined serpents. He unbuckled it and pulled the belt from the belt loops of his jeans. How this made our nights together flash through my mind, my body. Those nights of what we had years ago.
We were in school, graduate students, Ohio State. Mutual friends introduced us. A loud party. Music throbbing. We shouted at one another. That’s how I remember our first few moments. Shouting our outlines. Literature! You?! Anthropology! Apology?! No! Anthropology! Oh! Great! What’s your name again?! Eric! He gestured me out of the party, into a less noisy alley. Hi. Hello. Physical, intellectual attraction. He was cool, sensual, deft. We scheduled ourselves around one another, though what we had was slack, without commitment. This was good and right. We were both focused on our degrees. But Eric had a crisis, a seizure. Mid-bite of a tuna melt, suddenly on the floor of the cafeteria, writhing. Scans proved no cause, no blot or kink in his brain. But his idea of the world had skewed. It included the idea he had of me. So we ended what we had, who we were together. He had been on short trips to Mexico, expeditions to sift through ruins, but he needed to go there, move there, be there. I was not going to miss him. I had not taken him to heart. I accepted a job in Cincinnati. I met Peter within a year. The patio of a crowded Starbuck’s. Is this taken? Indicating the empty chair at my table. A tall man, but not too tall. I was reading a chapbook, a colleague’s poems about a sharpened pencil, a chipped teacup, the memory of an aunt’s breath. I tucked the chapbook into my satchel. A ladybug settled on the lid of my latte and crawled into the sip hole. This man thumbed the lid away and freed the ladybug. I marveled. This gentleness. “My name’s Peter.” It began that simply. Brown hair, narrow jaw. Necktie. He was almost handsome, almost sexy. It was this quality of almost that charmed me. He was a draftsman. I wasn’t sure what that was, but it sounded so solid. He wooed me cautiously, politely. It was a courtship. We slept together, fit together. Calmly. We fell in love. We married, without ceremony, without fuss, in the city courthouse. We found a pretty house on a pretty street. Maple trees. Trimmed lawns. Neighbors who waved hello. Neighbors with Volvos and schnauzers. We considered children, but edgily. A hesitancy there. His glum childhood. My childhood too, if less dismal. Peter and I had one another and this was plenty. And then he was dead, not long after our eighth anniversary.
* * *
In the din and swirl of the airport, I took an inventory of Eric, of his body. Lean, taut. That same dark hair. That same boyish elegance. He put on his cowboy boots, his belt. “Kate.” We embraced. That same woodsy scent. “Where are you going?”
“Denver.”
“So am I.”
He slung a gigantic backpack across his shoulders. This backpack was battered, dusty, thoroughly used. I wondered if his entire existence was in it, if it held all of the pieces of who he was now. This backpack in ancient jungles, cheap hostels, jostled in the back of ramshackle trucks.
We were actually on the same flight. We sat in the boarding area together. He had been in Cincinnati to lecture at a symposium. About Aztec doodads and whatnots. “Modern methods of classification.” I nodded. Suddenly shy, dumb. “And you, Kate? Married? Kids? Teaching?”
“Teaching, yes. Married too.” It seemed true when I said this, as if Peter was home. Or just getting home after a game of squash. I heard the screen door bang. I heard keys tossed onto the kitchen counter.
On the plane, Eric was a dozen rows ahead of me. I could see one elbow. I was reading Vanity Fair, an article about glamorous crooks, but my eyes drifted to that elbow. He strolled back to where I was seated. He lingered. I noticed a pale scar under his chin, a scar I hadn’t known. “Excuse me, sir.” The beverage cart. Eric went back to his seat. Across the aisle, a woman in lilac polyblend winked at me. “An old flame?” Flame, inflamed, flammable. I imagined another death for Peter. A hijacked plane, a bomb strapped around a fanatic’s hips, an explosion above Kansas, charred bodies culled out of a cornfield.
“I’m at the museum every day. Come in if you get a chance.” We trudged through the Denver airport. All these people going somewhere. Eric came with me out to the curb where Carla was idling in her Cherokee.
I had no words for Eric. I was teetering. Carla tapped her horn. A judging horn. I wheeled my suitcase towards her. Eric vanished. “Who was that, Kate?”
“A coincidence. My coincidence.”
“Oh.” Such suspicion carried in that oh. On the way to her house, she blathered about the weather. “Chilly! Hope you packed a coat.” Her son’s soccer team. “The Hornets! They’ve got the cutest uniforms.” Her daughter’s grades. “She’s a math whiz!” I made the appropriate noises, coo and wow, but in a niche in my mind was Eric unbuckling his belt.
* * *
Animals of black stone and jade. I pinch Eric’s wrist. “Yes,” he says. Thump, clatter. I’m unbalanced. I’m falling. Eric’s yes breaks my fall.
