Dept. Of Speculation

5

We passed the antelope diorama. “10×,” I said, but you wouldn’t look at me. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Nothing. Nothing. But, later, in the gem room, you got down on one knee. All around us shining things.

Advice from Hesiod: Choose from among the girls who live near you and check every detail, so that your bride will not be the neighborhood joke. Nothing is better for man than a good wife, and no horror matches a bad one.

Afterwards, we ducked into the borrowed room, fell back onto the borrowed bed. Outside, almost everyone who’d ever loved us waited. You took my hand, kissed it, saying, “What have we done? What the hell have we done?”

When we first met, I had a persistent cough. A smoker’s cough, though I’d never smoked. I went from doctor to doctor, but no one ever fixed it. In those early days, I spent a great deal of energy trying not to cough so much. I would lie awake next to you at night and try my best not to. I had an idea that I might have contracted TB. Here lies one whose name was writ in water, I thought pleasingly. But no, that wasn’t it either. Just after we married, the cough went away. So what was it, I wonder?

Loneliness?

Lying in bed, you’d cradle my skull as if there were a soft spot there that needed to be protected. Stay close to me, you’d say. Why are you way over there?

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

Also there were incursions from within. Mice, mice, everywhere. We borrowed a cat for a month, a ferocious mouser, who caught and ate all of them. His name was Carl and I could hear him up all night crunching their bones in the kitchen. It gave me a bad feeling, worse than the scuttling of the mice even. The boy I’d loved in New Orleans had told me once that his father used to kill mice by dropping them in boiling water. I was too surprised to ask then how he’d caught the mice or why he killed them that way, but later I wondered. His father was from another country so maybe that was how they did things over there.

In my old apartment, the mice had cavorted even more openly. They had no fear, not of light or even brooms, it seemed. They lived in my pantry and one night while we were lying in bed, the door fell off its hinges and thudded to the floor. “I think they saved up for that battering ram,” you said.