A Question of Logic

“I hope you realize that I’m a goddess, not a mortal,” she whispered as he nuzzled her neck and planted tiny kisses just at the top of her spine, causing her to shiver with delight and anticipation.

“How will this affect our relationship?” he responded, with characteristic logic. 

“Oh, wonderfully,” she answered, giving in to the sheer pleasure of his sudden touch upon her breast.

          But she did not know this man at all. How could she see then that he would never see the goddess within her, that years would go by when, as spouses, they would each inhabit a separate world except for the shared moments of physical intimacy when their bodies would cry out to remove the barriers between them.

          Selena was an artist. All her life she had fashioned things from bits of fabric, paper, paint, shells, feathers, photographs. One of her collages had won a prize in the senior high school art fair. She kept notebooks for drawing everywhere—on the bedside table, in a drawer in the kitchen, under the car seat, in the office she shared with other part-time teachers at the community college. She was always drawing. Dreaming and drawing and designing yet another project to work on in spare moments.

     “When are you going to do something with your life?” asked her husband in the evenings when she would sit at a drawing table in the family room while he watched TV.

          “I am doing something,” she responded. But there was a tenuous quality to her words, and she was quick to change the subject.

          Tom had gone straight through to his PhD, studying cognitive development, doing research and teaching. He was now authoring his fourth book on the function of the brain. He had no time to look at how the emotions or spirit might affect a human being, she thought, as he carried out his endless research projects, using their own children as guinea pigs.

          She remembered how he had brought over a test to give her the first night he had come to her home, after their first few dates. She had prepared a sumptuous dinner, but it sat in the kitchen getting cold as he cajoled her into taking the test he had just written up for his students.

          “Oh, not now, Tom,” she said, suddenly afraid that she would not answer the questions in the way he would want.

          “Dinner can wait,” he said, kissing her as he maneuvered her into a chair and handed her a pen.

          She read: “The boy ordered from the menu. The waiter brought him his dinner. The boy smelled the blank—the artichoke hearts with garlic sauce,” she added, filling in the blank.

          “No, no, Selena,” he responded. “Read the directions again.  You can only use one word as the answer.”

          “The bacon. The turnips. The asparagus,” she said, throwing out options.

          “Try another question,” he answered, shaking his head.

          “The boy enjoyed the party. The boy opened the presents. The boy lit the blank—

the bonfire!” she said, picturing the party on a sand dune on Long Island Sound.

          “No, no, it has to be candles, just like the first one has to be food. Can’t you see that you are not given enough information to come up with artichokes or bonfire?”

          “But I don’t want to give the ordinary answer, I want to think of creative words, beautiful words. . . .”

          “But that’s not how this test works,” he said, giving her a whole page of similar fill-in-the-blank questions.

          “Well why do they all have to be about ‘the boy’?” she asked. “Why can’t there be a girl in your questions?”

          “Because they all have to be as neutral and normative as possible,” he explained.

          “I see,” she said, although she really didn’t. All she could think of was the filet of sole growing cold in its tarragon-mustard sauce and the brussels sprouts becoming overcooked.

          She had only made 60 percent on his test, even after he’d coached her on a few more of the questions. “But you can’t mean that there’s only one right answer,” she said, finally jumping up to face the situation in the kitchen.

          “There’s only one logical answer,” he responded, smiling sweetly.

          Years later, she thought, “I should have said, ‘To hell with your logic’ and thrown the fish in his face right then and there.” But at the time she only felt a vague discomfort and dismissed it as she poured Perrier and served the dinner.

          It wasn’t just the test that had bothered her, she remembered. It was the questions that came from him during almost every interaction. They seemed cool, calculating, gauged to support some kind of research project, not the questions of someone who was in love with her and wanted to understand the secrets of her heart. The questions he asked the children were the same.

          “What did you learn in school today, Aaron?” he would prod. Or “How did you come to that conclusion?” It was never, “How did you feel about learning that?” or “Were you disappointed to make a ‘B’ on the test?”

          He had never approved of her own emotions, she realized. He was trying to make the children just like him, models of brilliant thinking, paragons of cognitive development. Never mind that they might feel angry or lost or sad or hurt or elated. What was important was that they use the brain as someone might program a computer.

          “You shouldn’t feel that way,” he would say to her whenever she had one of her outbursts.

          “But I DO FEEL this way,” she would sob, wishing she had never shared the incident with him, wishing she had somewhere to go in the house, somewhere to go that was all hers.

          Finally, she had to leave, and she rented a house near the beach, where she could draw and sort out the damaged fragments of her life. The children were allowed there, but not him. She wanted to forget his touch upon her skin, his hold over her mind.

          “Why do you need to do this?” he asked, wanting to understand the logic of her decision. But she shut him out and refused to answer his questions. She sat on the beach, mute, pale, looking at the waves and wishing she could just be buried by them in the sand.

          He sat in his office, week after week, staring at the wall and wondering why he couldn’t finish the last chapter of his book that the publisher awaited.

          She began to get up in the night and draw for long hours. There was a face that haunted her, a boy’s tearful face with eyes full of emotion, a face that wouldn’t let go of her. It was not the face of her son. Whose was it? She kept tracing around that face for hours, until dawn began to grace the sky and she would fall back into a troubled sleep.

          He started having dreams of his childhood, of the mother who had died when he was six. Why was he thinking of his mother, after all these years? His mind returned to his wife. Why had she left him? They had a good marriage, he had thought. An old note from her fell out of one of his philosophy books one afternoon. “My love,” it said. “Can you take some time off and join me for a picnic by the river?”

          He remembered that day. He had been scheduled to give a report at the faculty meeting. He’d had appointments with students who were concerned with their final papers and projects. It was preposterous to think of taking time off for a picnic by the river.

          But in his mind’s eye he now saw her in a pastel dress, flowers adorning her hair, taking cucumber sandwiches out of an old wicker basket. A sketchpad lay beside her. She was smiling and offering him a plate of food.

          Suddenly his eyes began misting, and he began to shake. He leaned over his desk and clutched at his papers, his outline for the final chapter of his book. He canceled his evening lecture, left his desk disheveled, and went home.

         Without knowing why, he went up to the attic. There he found a scrapbook of photographs from his childhood. As he turned page after page, memories began asserting themselves—of the dark days after his mother’s death, of his own father’s withdrawal from his life, of incompatible foster care, of the refuge he had found in books. He began to weep with a kind of intensity that he hadn’t felt in years. Tears poured out of him, leaving him in an unfamiliar state of grief, relief, and finally quietude.  

Selena resembled his mother in some ways, he thought. Selena was still alive, but had he ever really seen her? He had certainly never shown her these photos. That night he walked down to her house on the beach. She was sitting on a rock, finishing an oil painting of the boy whose face had haunted her. 

“My love,” he said, tenuously reaching out to stroke her hair. She moved, out of his reach. “I . . . I wanted to show you some pictures,” he finally uttered, not knowing why he was there, really, or what had caused him to cancel his lecture that evening. 

         Selena looked at his face. There was something different in his eyes, in his voice, in his manner of approach. She put down her brush. 

         “Let me see,” she said wearily. 

         As she turned the pages of his album, she studied the face of the little boy she had never seen. It was his face—the face she had been painting night after night. She began to cry and gestured toward her painting. He recognized the face as his own. 

         As he began to cry with her, he fumbled for her hand. 

         “Can we start over?” he asked. There was no logic in his tone, no coolness or calculation. She nodded, aware that the waves were lapping over their words and their wounds with a gentle, healing rhythm.