I guess it was guilt over the thought that seized me that morning—I’m going to divorce her, I just can’t stand it any more—which led to my carelessness.
I walked into the kitchen to get some coffee, and Audrey was sitting at the kitchen table, bent down to examine a wound on her leg. I almost recoiled in horror. It looked as though someone had taken the claw end of a hammer and gashed the outside of her calf. There was no blood, but it was ghastly.
“What happened?” I cried, and she looked up as though nothing in the world was wrong.
“I banged it on the coffee table.”
“My God! We should get you to the hospital, it looks terrible, maybe you need stitches,” I said, feeling a little queasy as I leaned over to look more closely. Strange. It was dry, like an old wound already half-healed, ugly and livid on her pale skin.
“I’ve already been to the doctor, it’s fine—it’s the prednisone, it makes my skin delicate. It will probably never heal completely. So much for shorts this summer.”
The prednisone was for the lupus, and the side-effects of the treatment—well, I might have said they were worse than the disease, except the disease could, might still, kill her. It had turned my pale, red-headed beauty—think Nicole Kidman, but all curves—into something more closely resembling a sausage, bloated and oozing on a grill, and this gash now on her leg reminded me of when a ballpark frank swells up and pops, revealing the soft, uncooked interior.
Complaining about the unending nature of her disease only served to make me look like a bad husband. I know she confided in her girlfriends about it, but I really had tried my best. How could I be blamed for my changing appetite when my wife no longer even resembled the woman I had married? Neither was I the man she fell in love with, I suppose, but I hadn’t totally let myself go. A few extra pounds had not completely altered my appearance, I didn’t think, the way her disease and the drugs had changed hers.
And she saw my withdrawal, of course she did, and I felt bad that she felt bad, covering up with loose pants and muumuus around the house—the reason I didn’t notice the gash—it had been two months, she told me as I fixed a pot of coffee and put on my reading glasses to examine the wound, with the kitchen light turned on this time. I felt an actual physical twinge of pain in my own leg looking at it.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“You know, not really—I didn’t even realize it had happened. I banged my shin while I was vacuuming, and you know how it is, ouch, but whatever, and then later I looked down and almost fainted!”
“I think I’m going to faint now,” I said. And I meant it. The sight of it hit home just how repulsed I was by what she had become—physically anyway, not mentally of course, same old Audrey—but it got me to thinking about touching it, touching her, and whether—if I can be forgiven the leap, which happens often at this age, all the wondering about whether we are past the things we took for granted in our youth—looking good in a bathing suit, running into the surf, sex in the dunes after the sun has gone down and all the kids and parents had gone home—whether that was all now behind us, and our next step would be that shaky infirmness, that old-person’s hesitation before stairs, curbs, escalators—every step a threat.
The drip-drip of the coffee pot ended abruptly with its final whoosh of steam, and I looked over in surprise to see it full—I would have thought I had just flipped the switch—it seemed almost as though the pot might already have been full when I turned it on, and that it might start to drip in reverse and empty itself, and I half-chuckled at the thought.
Audrey sat up straight and dropped the hem of her housedress to cover herself up again. “It looks a lot better than it did.”
I wondered if she had heard me coming downstairs, if uncovering her leg to examine it had been her way to show me finally, and see how I would react. Unfortunately, I believe she got the reaction she expected, and she just sat then at the table staring out the window as I poured my coffee.
I probably should have offered to pour her a cup, but I didn’t. I just walked to the back hall, as though silence were the proper course, as though ignoring the horror of it was as good—better—than acknowledging that, yes, her looks were ruined. Oh, not by her leg. Maybe not even by the drugs, or the lupus. But time.
If I hadn’t been feeling that schmuck’s selfish sense of remorse, that lingering question about whether I should go back into the kitchen, kneel down before her on the kitchen floor and wrap my arms around her legs to reassure her that I loved her and she was still beautiful to me—even if it was a lie!—and if my mind weren’t still in the kitchen, but on the stairs leading down to my study, I wouldn’t have missed that step, and fallen the entire flight down, more awkwardly and jumbled than I really should have because I was trying to protect my full cup of coffee and couldn’t believe it was happening.
I landed in a heap on the hard tile floor at the bottom with my leg bent where it shouldn’t be and in an improbable direction. Hot coffee splashed and scalded my hand and arm. Audrey ran to the top of the stairs and yelped. I could see all of her hurt vanish in an instant, but she did not rush down all the steps as her initial impulse appeared to be, she stepped down only once and then stopped. As though suddenly remembering what had just transpired, she snorted a curt laugh and shook her head.
She went to call an ambulance, and as we live down the block from the hospital, she barely had time to give our address and answer the emergency operator’s questions before returning to the top of the stairs to look down on me and report that they were pulling up in front of the house and she had to go let them in. She did not ride in the ambulance with me to the hospital because she wanted to change her clothes and pull herself together, it was only a block away, and she would walk over and be with me in twenty, thirty minutes, tops.
And so it was that the skin of my hand and arm remained waxen, wrinkled and pink from the scalding coffee, and I ended up with an almost identical wound on my own shin as Audrey’s, where my bone had popped through, though I wouldn’t realize it until months later when the cast was removed.
I returned from the doctor to an empty house, sat in the same chair in the kitchen to examine my leg, made a mental note to buy a new coffee pot.
I have to admit I was not liking your protagonist at all -so twisted at the end! Great writing, it hooked me in.
Eeeeee! Generous, self-aware, raw honesty here. Not an easy landscape. Well done Troy.