About a Month or So Later

Maybe he’d had a stroke after the fact. One never knew when you lived alone. Jennie wasn’t there to say, “You’ve had a stroke.” She wasn’t there to say, “You live here, too,” when he asked her where the tape was, or the bourbon, or a hammer.

Probably he’d always been this way. Before the incident. Numb in the head. Dumb in the head. No strum in the head. No music to tickle his ivories. To feel joy. He’d never been very emotive. He’d left Jennie high and dry on that score. Had he stopped tickling Jennie’s ivories, or had she stopped tickling his? Gross. Whoever thought of that way to say it? He shrugged his shoulders.

It wasn’t like he felt nothing. He felt the spoon in his hand, the stirring motion, the heat from his coffee, the dent in his head when he touched his fingers to it, but he didn’t feel his teeth on his lips when the corners went up with the pudge of a smile on his cheeks, because he hadn’t smiled in a very long time, if he ever had. He couldn’t remember if he ever had.

He walked to the mirror in the bathroom with the coffee in his hand. “Do I know you?” He tried to smile, but the corners didn’t rise. It was an open mouth kind of thing, all teeth and gums. An expression of pain, if he knew how to express pain. Or the look of a crazed person.

He sat the coffee cup on the back of the toilet and ran a brush through his hair. Monkey hair, monkey ears. He put his hands over his mouth, over his eyes, over his ears. “Feel no evil,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders, again. If Jennie had said it, he would have rolled his eyes like he did when she said things like, “I feel like I’m talking to no one,” or “I feel like I’m a tree in the desert.” She was always saying things that made no sense. Until now. Until he was the tree in the desert.

A steady and stoic tree.

Do trees wonder why?

Maybe. Maybe they do.

Do they wonder why their feet are stuck? He didn’t think so. Not any more than he wondered why he was the way he was. “You don’t reflect,” Jennie said. “You don’t grow.” He’d rolled his eyes. Trees don’t reflect. They grow.

Trees don’t reach to entwine each other’s branches. To belong. For kinship. For rapport. For intimacy, the way Jennie begged of him.

Jennie would have waited around forever in the marriage if he hadn’t had that bourbon that night. She would have continued to believe in the chance that he’d make the marriage right, if the bourbon hadn’t driven him into her studio with the hammer in his hand. If he hadn’t spotted the still life.

She’d painted eyes on an eggplant in the still life. She’d painted his eyes on the eggplant. His eyes painted on a big, purple, dopey-looking eggplant, laying on its side, on a rustic plank table, removed from the other vegetables painted in a bowl. There was no doubt they were his eyes on that eggplant. The eyes were heavy-lidded, with the same sag below each eye as his own eye bags. The eyes were painted small for the size of the eggplant, like the eyes on his face were small for the size of his head. If he felt things, he would have been galled that the large hand-carved bowl that she painted, the bowl that held the other vegetables in a group of camaraderie, was the bowl he’d bought at a roadside stand in Vermont. The bowl was oval. Live-edged. It cost him a pretty penny. The eggplant, with his eyes, should have been included inside that live-edged bowl, not on the edge of the rustic plank table. He should have been painted alive like the rest of the vegetables, part of the animated group in the live-edged bowl, next to Jennie, who painted her own eyes on a tomato, eyes that looked up at a handsome potato whose eyes were looking into her eyes.

If he felt things, he would have felt like Jennie said she felt before they had an argument, when she said she felt like a soda pop bottle that was bubbling with feelings that needed to explode. Whoosh.

He’d held the hammer high over his head and brought it down prong-side into the canvas of the still life, rip, ripping, until the eggplant on its side on the plank table lay alone at the edge of a hole in the canvas where the other vegetables had been painted in the bowl.

Jennie surprised him, when she walked into the room, when she tried to grab the hammer from his hands. He had to struggle to keep hold. The blow to his forehead was an accident. The crush to his skull was an accident. He had ahold of the hammer. Jennie had ahold of the hammer. Both their hands were on the hammer’s handle when it happened.

Only he had ahold of the hammer when he hit her back. In the jaw. Just to make it even, so she wouldn’t feel bad about hitting him, because Jennie had feelings and she would probably feel bad about hitting him and he wanted to make things even between them, so they could start fresh, so they could go on from this, but Jennie didn’t see it that way. She had her jaw fixed, but she didn’t come back. She didn’t even collect her paints, or her paintings, or her clothes. She left to start fresh.

Sometimes, when he was too aware of being alone, he went into her closet to smell her clothes, or like today, after he heated the water to make a second cup of coffee, he walked into Jennie’s studio. He felt the heat of the coffee cup in his hands, the smell of the earth in its steam, the warmth of the coffee down his throat.

He didn’t laugh, but if he could laugh, if he’d ever laughed, if he could reflect, the eggplant on the outside of that hole in the canvas, staring back at him with his own eyes, laying on its side on the plank table, resisting the tug to fall into the hole with the rest of those vegetables, might have made him laugh at how much the eggplant really did look like him. How much it was him. Was he crazy? One never knew when you lived alone.