If you can read this you are NOT Glen Fadlo of Waltham, CT.
This story resides in the Bleak Holiday collection.
The man sat at the table, drenched in the dense California sunlight that
burned through the glass patio doors - American sunlight - and he felt like an
important part of an important moment. He was in this place now. He stirred his
coffee and scanned his newspaper and felt satisfied. He felt proud of his
house, his career. He loved his wife. He realized this with urgent clarity and
a gratitude that usually eluded him. The sounds of Carol fixing breakfast in
the kitchen comforted him, secured him to the world, and after a while the
smell of bacon and toast traveled through the swinging door and he felt better
still. It was a perfect moment, an exact
moment, when the very molecules of existence seemed to coalesce and charge his darkening
heart; a heart that had begun to harden and retreat from the anxious
complications of impending middle age.
The newspaper was still filled with the recent tragedy. A great American
had died in Dallas at the hands of a troubled young man, and then the young man
was in turn gunned down by a man with a jeweled name who ran a nightclub. He
wondered if he should feel so calm and contented so soon after a national calamity
and with this thought, the perfect moment was gone. One brief blaze of doubt
had kindled it to mist.
The swinging door flapped open and Carol crossed the dining room and set
a plate of fried eggs, bacon and toast in front of him.
“Here you are, darling,” she said, beaming. When she smiled, her whole
face smiled. The depth of her eyes intensified her expressions to the point of
heartbreak.
“Thank you, dear,” the man said, glancing up from his paper. She bent
down, offering her cheek, and he gave her a quick peck.
“What are your plans for today?” she asked him.
“Plans,” he said, then scooped a forkful of egg into his mouth.
“Yes, plans. What are your plans?”
“Exactly.”
“Huh?”
“Plans.”
She spoke his name in anger, her eyes transmitting sudden frustration.
The bright smile had vanished.
He laughed. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m drawing up plans for the new art
gallery they want to build downtown. So, I’m planning… to plan plans!” He laughed
again and shrugged his shoulders, eyebrows raised in a way he knew she found
cute.
But she didn’t find it cute this time. “Oooh!” she said, giving voice to her waning patience and then
stormed back into the kitchen.
He shrugged again and returned to his breakfast.
When the man finished eating he lifted his plate and coffee cup and carried
them into the kitchen. Carol was standing at the sink, scrubbing the frying pan
with brisk, angry strokes, her small, delicate hands hidden under Playtex Living
gloves. The man came up behind her and kissed her gently on the neck. She
stiffened slightly, still cross with him.
The man cast his eyes down and toed the linoleum like a repentant little
boy. “Gee, I’m sorry honey,” he said. “I was just kidding around. I woke up
feeling playful today.”
“Well, I’m not feeling playful
today,” she said in a firm voice, dunking the frying pan in the soapy water.
Bits of eggwhite floated in the foam and the man studied them as if they were
keys to a dream.
His wife released a long, suffering sigh and the man wondered, not for
the first time, why he felt driven to continually test her patience. Maybe he
just couldn’t understand what she saw in him, such a beautiful woman, and he
needed to prove himself unworthy of her love by acting like an obtuse clown, a
bumbling fool.
He cleared his throat and tugged his collar and when he spoke he hoped
that his tone conveyed honest concern.
“What’s bothering you, dear?”
She tilted soapy water from the pan and then dunked it in the clear
water of the rinse basin. “Well, if you must know…”
“Yes?” he said, an eager inflection in his voice. But he knew from her
prologue that he would not be getting the truth. She would complain about
wanting a new dress, a fur, or a week in Hawaii. But he knew what she really wanted above all else. It was the
cruel, desperate nucleus from which all the small, pesky little demands sprang.
He had been unable to give her a child for two years now and maternal panic
kept her on a precarious emotional edge. When they were in town and a newborn in
a stroller wheeled past, the pained, longing look on her face was enough to
make his heart burst into soft fragments. Even now, without looking at her
face, he felt a sickening mix of pity and guilt.
“Never mind,” she said, slipping his yolk-smeared plate into the warm
suds.
He thought of saying something cheerful, or cracking a joke, but he knew
the gesture would only make her feel worse. He placed his hand on her shoulder,
felt a nuance of tensed muscle, and then left her alone.
He stepped outside, into the
backyard, the fresh air reviving him, gifting him with a faded filament of his
earlier reverie. The little apple tree next door was dotted with blossoms,
active with orbiting bees. The man still found it hard to believe that Roger,
his neighbor and often-difficult friend, was gone. A military officer from the
man’s Air Force past had moved in not long after the funeral. A colonel. His
old commander.
The colonel sometimes thought the man was crazy.
A lot of people thought he was crazy. He could see it in the baffled, uneasy
expressions that sometimes confronted him. He knew what people said about him
behind his back. He didn’t care. He knew his grasp on reality was not tenuous.
He was not clinging to sanity like a man in a roiling void. His sense of
himself, of his life, was settled on a foundation of safe, unyielding bedrock. He
knew this. Granted, he could act eccentric at times and circumstances
necessitated a certain degree of secrecy, but he was not crazy.
The man entered a small stable at the edge of the backyard. His office
was there. His best friend lived there.
“Good morning, Ed!” he said.
The horse was wearing glasses, reading The Wall Street Journal. He didn’t
look up when he said, “Mornin’, Wilbur.”
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