The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [80]
“Mm-hmm. I know.”
“Okay. I’m going to drive you back to your hotel now.”
“No. Please. It’s not far. I can walk.”
“Right,” he said, “I understand,” and she believed he did somehow. “Nina? How long before you’re better, do you think?”
“I wish I knew. Not tomorrow. Two days, I hope.”
“Two days.” He made it sound like a fact he was memorizing for a quiz. “Listen, this bruise on my arm, on my biceps?” He notched the contusion with his thumbnail. “I got it from punching myself after your Bellingham reading. I kept saying, ‘Catau, you’re going to ask this woman to dinner.’ I was mad at myself for chickening out. That’s all. I was just embarrassed to tell you before.”
And then his hand was on top of hers, and he was saying goodbye, and she felt that old carnal tightening in her knees, that flush of heat in her chest, and suddenly, in her imagination, she was sinking into bed with him and his caresses were covering her body in babyskin. How long had it been since she was well enough to unbutton someone’s shirt and dot his stomach with kisses? And did she have to be well enough? Maybe she was sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn’t she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts?
In her hotel room, she cried and then set her clothing out for the next day, turned her blanket down, and called Wallace. For half an hour, she lay in bed debriding her mouth with hydrogen peroxide, letting the watery chlorine taste spread down her tongue and into her throat as she wondered what had happened.
She switched on the TV. A sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were assembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest gestures set off waves of swirling photons.
There was a woman, not quite old but not quite young, whose fiancé had died unexpectedly. It was barely a month into their engagement and the two of them were attending a chamber music concert when he began coughing into his sleeve and excused himself from his seat. Because they had quarreled earlier over the cost of the wedding, she did not worry about him when he failed to return. Instead, with exasperation, she thought, What could possibly be keeping him?, little realizing that what was keeping him was death.
When she went to the foyer to look for him, she found a ring of ushers clustered around his body as if he were a spill for which no one wanted to accept responsibility. She would never forget the sight of his tongue pressed to his teeth, struggling to form some word he had just missed his chance of saying.
More than a year had gone by since then, a terrible year of ill health, sleeplessness, and rainy days that layered themselves over her like blankets. Who was she? Who had she become? Her skin was paler than it used to be, her hair grayer. Recently she had noticed creases lingering around her eyes in the morning, and also across her forehead, as if she had spent the night squinting into a harsh light. The lines did not go away when she rubbed them, vanishing only gradually as the hours wore on, and she could foresee a time when the mask of age that grief had placed over her face would simply be her face. She missed her fiancé terribly. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was only a beautiful story she had told herself, so quickly had she fallen in love with him and so quickly had he left her. It was hard to believe that that man who refused to