Mortals

Does dumda love a dumda?
Are you my Valentine?

He thought, But why am I doing this if I think she’s betrayed me?… because she may not have, except that I smelled fear on her… that’s the thing, unfortunately.

The shower went on. The length of this shower was important.

Or I could make it the best valentine I ever wrote, he thought, shame her and remind her. There had been a decline in complexity, a decline in the amount of effort he put into the project, over the years. And there had been a drift to the more humorous and away from the grandiose, as he now considered them, the grandiose efforts of the early days of their marriage, his efforts at real poetry. Although it wasn’t all his fault that he’d stopped attempting a certain kind of valentine. She had complained about some of the early ones. That wasn’t true. She hadn’t complained but she had noted that they seemed to contain a despairing tone not exactly appropriate to the occasion. One of his lines, The last light slips from the highest peaks, had led to a discussion he had come away from depressed, he remembered, or deflated. Also, now she was writing limericks herself, apparently. What could he do?

The shower-sound stopped. A dense silence replaced it.

There were other things in their past… like the game of Baseless Admonitions, where one of them would shout completely arbitrary or inappropriate injunctions and warnings and accusations at the other, like You love only gold! or Be true to your school! or… what others? This means war! Christ, there had been dozens of these canards and where were they now? You mate with any beast! had been another one, thank you very much. Why had the game dropped away? This was an interesting question, and so was the question of who had been the first one to stop initiating these exchanges.

Last year’s valentine had been the shortest.

Rude Time won’t go away
But neither will my love for you,
So that’s okay.

But she had claimed she liked it, loved it, and now this…

Iris came tentatively into the room, wearing a bathrobe now, a towel around her neck. It meant nothing, necessarily, that her eyes seemed red.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“Well, the shower…”

“I’m sorry.”

He reassured her that he was better.

She came to him, took his hand, and looked imploringly, he thought, down at him. Something was coming. He pulled himself up against the headboard. She had something clutched in one hand, a card, white, a note? It was going to be relevant. What was it?

She sighed, looked away from him, then reached over and pushed Rex’s letter out of the way, as though she wanted the zone around him empty of any distraction. She tried to begin, twice. It was clear she didn’t know how to begin with whatever was coming and about to kill him, no doubt. She patted his hand, which was the worst sign possible. He was numb.

“Your voice sounds so hollow in these rooms… because of the high ceilings,” she said. He shrugged.

She was circling. She couldn’t bear it, either, which was something. He thought, Does Gallo love his wine?

She mastered herself, swallowing. “Anyway,” she said.

“Anyway… Did you know that my father once told me he wouldn’t read Conrad because Conrad was a Jew, something he concluded from the jacket portrait on The Portable Conrad I’d given him for a present. It was frightening. I was stunned. I’d never known he was an anti-Semite. But you repress things. I’d forgotten about it. It was out of the blue.”

Ray was listening. It was clear that this was deeply fraught for her. She seemed to be in a state of upheaval. Life is insane, he thought.

“You can probably tell I’ve been talking about this kind of thing, Ray, and…

“And anyway, I’ve been seeing someone…” She rushed it out, squeezing Ray’s hand and moving closer to him.

He couldn’t speak, at first. He could groan.

“Oh God,” he said finally.

“Wait, but what’s wrong. I haven’t…”

“What’s wrong? You said you’re seeing someone, I mean this is the way the world ends…”

She broke in with “Oh please can we discuss this without literary quotations coming into it, please please please. No I’m sorry.

“No, I’m seeing a doctor, a very fine, well, therapist, but he’s also a doctor of medicine, which I know is important. Oh my darling, no. A doctor, which is where I was today when you came in, and of course I hadn’t told you and I didn’t want to tell you. But. But. Ray, I have been unhappy. Oh but God you’re an idiot!” She stopped to compose herself a little.

“I’ve been three times. It’s very helpful, Ray. He’s just around the corner. It’s been really important for me, really good. Amazingly good. And I didn’t tell you because you have enough on your plate and I thought I could go a few times and, well, feel better, and I could avoid bringing you into it because you know the way you are. You hover and worry and you hover and you worry about me if I… Well, you know. You want me to be happy so much. And that’s what I want, for your sake, really. Mine too, though.

“And I didn’t even go originally because I was unhappy, really. This is true. I went because I thought my urine looked too dark. Which I mentioned to you and you thought I was being absurd I guess. You said it was chloroquine, but we’ve been taking chloroquine for years and I never noticed that effect. But you didn’t look, you just insisted that we all fluctuate or whatever you said. So.

“My urine is fine, by the way.

“But anyway he’s, well, quite holistic I suppose is the term, and he asked about whatever else might be bothering me. He could hardly not see it.

“And, well… So I go to him now. I was going to tell you. It’s just that you surprised me today and I wasn’t ready to.

“So that was stupid.

“Also he’d told me to tell you.”

What she’d been clutching was an appointment card. She handed it to Ray.

“This is the man,” she said. “You’d approve of him.”

The card read Davis Morel, M.D., 16 Tshekedi Crescent, Gaborone, Eclectic Medicine. Her next appointment was for the following Tuesday, at noon.

Ray reached for her and, trembling, embraced her fiercely.

She relaxed.

12. He Knew Astonishing Things

Two days had passed.

Tonight dessert was half a papaya each, perfectly ripe papaya that deserved to be savored bite by bite, he