Of course no one had asked him what he was doing here in the art museum. No one had spoken to him at all. But he had been formulating an answer. He really had no idea where his wife had gone. All too quickly the traces of her outside their small home had been erased. He had no idea where to find her, so he was looking here, examining these paintings for clues. It made no sense, but he was convinced it was the right thing to do.
When he returned home that evening he fixed himself a sandwich and carried it into the living room, and sat with it on the palm of his hand and did not eat it. He could feel it drying out on his weary, outstretched palm, but he could not bring himself to take it into his mouth. Eventually he laid the uneaten sandwich onto a side table alongside several books his wife was never able to finish reading, and sat some more, gazing around the room, trying to find additional traces of where she had been, what she had touched.
He remembered she sometimes sat in this chair and knitted at odd times during the day and night. Sometimes he would awaken in the middle of the night and her side of the bed would be empty. He would come downstairs and discover her sitting here knitting squares, putting together blankets and sweaters and various indecipherable soft objects. She said she just couldn’t sleep anymore. She said she had simply lost track of things and now had to figure things out.
After she died he had tried to learn how to knit without any success. He simply could not see how to create patterns, then recognizable objects, out of piles of seemingly limitless string. Instead he had sat here gingerly cupping a ball of yarn in each hand, as if he were holding eggs, as if showing some sort of reverence for the act would bring him understanding. But it never had.
He picked up one of the books she had left behind: Beloved, by Toni Morrison. He found the ornate metal bookmark she had inserted a third of the way through the book, a bookmark he had never seen before, but one so special he felt it must have been his wife’s way of honoring this particular volume. He remembered that she had talked about this novel, how much she had loved it, how anxious she had been to get to the next page. But he was sorry that he did not remember anything more specific than that about the book itself.
He’d never read much fiction—fiction made him feel uncomfortable. He assumed the main characters were more or less masks of the author. Otherwise, how could the author make the story seem real? Fiction, he thought, must be a very strange sort of autobiography, portraying what the author wanted to happen, dreaded might happen, would happen if the author were of another sex, lived in a different country, had different personality traits, took a different path, job, spouse, etc. How did authors feel when their books were misread? What if people liked the character in your book better than who you were on such and such a particular day? He found such layering disturbing, and all too close to the way most people viewed their own lives.
But she’d loved the book and had wanted to finish it, and so, over the next few days, he finished it for her, reading it aloud despite the weaknesses in his speaking voice. He didn’t think he needed to read it aloud so that she might hear it. He’d never believed in such things. Wherever she was he didn’t think she was in any position to physically hear anything. He read it aloud so that the words might live in this home they’d shared all their married life.
Across the street from the art museum there was a park where people came to preach, to give speeches, to perform, or to express themselves in any way desired, as long as they didn’t ask for money or offend common decency. The city government prided itself on its openness and the privilege was well used. Every day there were crowds.
One afternoon he brought a folding table and a battered old suitcase into the park, and out of the suitcase he retrieved a variety of records, which he laid out on the table for display. All of these records had to do with his wife’s life, her long illness, and her death. At one end of the table there were photo albums from her childhood, letters to her parents from camp, a lock of hair from her first haircut. Next to these were laid out their wedding pictures and a variety of snapshots from their marriage: a trip out west, a day at the beach, a picnic in their own front yard when the car wouldn’t start. He and his wife appeared together in all of the shots, and when he examined them he became obsessed with trying to remember what friend, neighbor, or stranger had been pressed into service as photographer. For most of the photographs a clear identification of the person taking the picture was impossible, as any normal person might expect. He understood this. But still it troubled him. Had these record makers been purely accidental, or was it possible that some had hung around hoping to be recruited for just such a purpose? Certainly, if these people hadn’t been there, there might be no record that his long marriage to this wonderful woman had occurred at all.
At the other end of the table he stacked medical records and some pictures from her final years. He had been the photographer for these, and had taken so many portraits of her during this time that choosing a few representative photos had been a difficult task.
Specific facts having to do with her height and weight, the amount of space she occupied, her exact age to the minute at time of death, were prominently displayed. “This is the space and time she occupied,” he repeated again and again when reciting these figures.
There were relatively few visitors to his table that first day, but for those that did come he provided a lengthy narrative concerning his wife, their time together, and her relatively recent death. He was undeterred by the lack of questions—he enjoyed talking about her so much, and it had been such a long time since he’d had the opportunity to talk about her, that the public’s lack of interest wasn’t about to dissuade him. He returned to the park every day that week and delivered essentially the same presentation.
The following week he decided to add a new element to the performance, not only to make it more interesting for himself, but to draw some of the larger crowds available during warmer weather. Despite his lack of formal dance training, despite his singular ineptitude with anything involving coordinated movement, he positioned himself behind the table and began a series of sweeping, yet precise, gestures, which might have been untrained yoga, untrained martial arts, untrained dance, or the unintentional movements of someone afflicted with a nervous disease. During these movements he delivered the same talk he had the week before, except this time there were more questions from the audience.
He grasped, he moved, he took a large inhalation of air. He faltered, he limped, he ached, he winced. He tried to exemplify how it was to be in the world for the number of years he had walked upon this planet. He tried to show the truth of his body and the solitary nature of his existence, and, without using the exact words, just how much he missed her.
He meditated on his hands as they moved through the air. He tried to make the movements of his performance as natural as possible. He attempted to imitate the everyday movements he made as he went through a normal day: cooking, washing hands, taking medications, holding his face as he wept. He imagined his movements as invisible brush strokes. He imagined himself as Clifford Stills, as Jackson Pollock. He imagined himself as some anonymous figure struggling through the wind and driving rain of his very worst day.
He rarely looked at the figures of his audience as he made his performances. It required too much focus just to imitate everyday natural movements for him to give his audience much more than a passing glance. But every so often he became aware of a slight blurring of the edges of the crowd. Now and then he became aware of the forgotten figures coming out of hiding, their vague outlines filling with heat and color to become targets for his eyes.