Secrets of the Apple (41 page)

The handwritten pages broke off before the end of the story, but tucked into the back pocket of the binder Ryoki found several pages, typewritten, single-spaced, dated much earlier than the rest, probably a few months before her divorce. The back page stuck to the leather as he tugged it out, leaving a pale brown stain on the paper.

The Airport

By Kathryn Porter

“I want a divorce,” he said.

In my peripheral vision I could see the line from the ticket counters snaking closer as the maze filled. A mother with three small children, four suitcases and two carry-ons struggled past me as fast as they could. I hoped they made their plane.

“What?” I said.

“I want a divorce,” he said, without rancor.

I should not have been surprised, but I was. Seconds earlier I’d smiled to myself, thinking how romantic it was for him to leave his car illegally unattended at the curb, just to walk me through the doors. A sign of hope, I’d thought.

I looked directly at him. He appeared to face me steadily, but kept his focus a fraction to the left, barely noticeable. I knew he’d chosen a public place so I wouldn’t cry or make a scene, a smart tactic, very sanitary, a move he’d probably brag about in later years, “Yeah, I dropped my ex at the airport and told her to just keep going,” brash and debonair in the locker room. Except here in the moment he felt bad, possibly even ashamed. I couldn’t gauge how long that feeling might last. Maybe forever, or maybe just until he got back to his car.

Over the loudspeaker a polished voice requested the owner of a dark gray Mercedes to please return to the curb before the car was towed. Outside the sliding glass doors, we could see the car and the curb attendant glaring at us as he spoke into his radio. He looked mean, but he’d given us a chance, a warning. I suspected he had a kind heart. My husband whirled and sprinted to his car, yelling, “You could see me! You could see me! Don’t touch that car!” He’d only had it a month and didn’t care to lose it, not after all the sacrifices he’d made to get it.

A blessed numbness carried me through the ticket line. I sleepwalked through security and almost to my gate before noticing my purse was flapping open. I put my hand in to feel for my wallet, just in case. 

On the plane I took out my compact and checked my makeup. No-shine perfect lipstick good hair day. I clicked the compact shut, pulled out a book and pretended to read for the rest of the flight, occasionally turning pages whenever I remembered.

On the ground Grandma and Grandpa Porter greeted me. I smiled and hugged, made all the appropriate noises in the appropriate places. After dinner we talked about books and needlepoint, and watched a baseball game on TV. Grandma pulled out all her colorful threads and demonstrated a new stitch without pushing me to try it myself.

At ten-thirty Grandpa started to nod off and I opened my mouth in a convincing yawn. I pled traveler’s fatigue and shuffled off to the corner bedroom where I always slept under a creamy embroidered coverlet that belonged in a museum. As was my habit, I turned out the lamp and knelt in bed to say my prayers before lying down and closing my eyes. I wanted desperately to cry, to heave and scream like a steam engine, but the house was so quiet.

An hour later I sat up and knelt amidst the covers, thinking maybe I could talk to God a little longer. But my gift for language deserted me and all my intricate thoughts burst into the air, pared and infantile. “Please help please help please help.” The tears came after that, great wrenching sobs filtered to fragments by Grandma’s deep goose down pillows.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I awoke abruptly without a single groggy blink, my mind’s eye still full of three curly coal-black heads shining in the sun, small, squealing, running through the sprinklers in front of my grandparents’ house, a vivid dream of the children I would one day cuddle and scold, a stunning snippet from the future: God’s answer to my strangled prayer. Ridiculous, of course; a dream’s a dream, no proof of truth, except every cell in my body somehow
knew.
It was an awful knowing. Even with a “C” in Biology, I understood that brown and blond seldom pick a trifecta of inky black.

I held up my hand and looked at the ring on my finger, thought of the naïve, romantic girl who accepted it, and the determined woman who had kept her promise. I rubbed the ring with my thumb, the way married women do—half carat brilliant cut, good color, with a defect that could be seen with the naked eye, but only in direct sunlight. A month into the marriage I’d been waiting in the car and noticed a circle of dead light among the tiny prisms sliding around the dashboard. Examining my ring, I found a small dark spot on the stone. I puffed on it, rubbed it on my pants, and finally took it to a jeweler for cleaning. He confirmed what I already suspected, that the flaw ran deep under the surface. “It’s a beautiful ring, though,” he added.
Too tired to start over with a new dark spot
.

I hadn’t seen the children’s faces. Maybe there had been unnoticed shadows that darkened their hair, making it
appear
black? It could be brown, a really dark brown, perhaps, if I got a better look. Brown was a genetic possibility, a ray of hope that all my efforts hadn’t been wasted.

I thought again about what had happened at the airport, imagining the whole scene as it would appear in a movie. The actress who played me would stand looking at my husband, shocked at first, then her eyes would narrow slightly and she would stand straighter. Pulling the ring from her finger, she’d throw it in his face, or maybe the producer would switch the modest round diamond for a big sharp marquis she could drop down his pants with a flick of her wrist before she turned, smiling to herself, and stalked off in triumph, her feet striking the floor to a steady rock beat. 

It wouldn’t be what really happened. There had been no soundtrack, no Friday night chick-flick audience to whoop and holler, no simple, satisfying wrap-up in the interest of time.  I twisted the ring around my finger. I’d never loved the design, too fussy for my taste. Up close it was flawed, I was flawed, he was flawed. Mostly my husband didn’t like to share or forgive. I’d realized too late about the forgiving. He believed he was marrying a goddess and never really got over waking up with a human being.

At the beginning it worried me all the time, knowing he’d seen through my fraud. All my life the grownups had been impressed, pulling my pigtails, fondly chucking my chin, singling me out as special, without ever defining what that meant. I had some aptitudes, all arts-related, but couldn’t cut it at math or science, the classes where good students would end up making real money. In high school my American classmates had been more savvy, smelling insecurity on the new kid like blood in the water.

Occasionally strong attraction prompted me to fight through the fear and open my mouth in front of a boy. I could hear the oddities that came out, but could never quite stop them in time, sometimes wished I’d been born mute.

In college I reinvented myself, learned to bat my eyelashes as a party trick and enter the room like I owned it. I had plenty of friends in college, a large collection of boyfriends. I smiled to myself as I tried to remember some of their names and faces. It struck me as funny that I never thought about my successful college days, but sometimes still blushed recalling the crammed catalogue of embarrassing moments known as high school.

I rolled over on my side and picked at the tiny French knots dotted around the intricate floral pattern. What was I now, success or failure? My husband had seen through me early in our marriage. The shy, awkward girl was still in there and sometimes put in an appearance at a work party when he needed me to sparkle, to make him look good. He’d seen me for what I feared myself to be, ordinary, or maybe a little less.

If I wanted I could give him that divorce, take my opportunity to stand up in the court of public opinion and provide plenty of evidence of his abuse. “Every day he belittled me, Your Honor. Stripped me down and picked my bones. Always harped on my insignificance.” I could hand over all kinds of facts, tell a memorable story that would make some people shake their heads and others cry. I could easily produce all the trappings, except a real victim. Under oath, though, I would have to add, “Scraping me free of all the charms that used to prop me up, he somehow revealed a woman I never knew existed. But he hasn’t spotted me quite yet.” At that point the story would lose momentum and the audience would walk away, grumbling, “She nearly had us there. Fool didn’t know when to quit.”

I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, hugging my knees and wondering if he would ever really look at me.

Five minutes later I got out of bed and pulled my drawing case from my luggage. I knew I wasn’t a natural artist, never had more than a germ of talent, but I’d taken enough drawing classes in connection with my Fashion major that I could at least sketch creditably. I’ll never forget the electrifying day in my Portraits class when the model’s actual likeness appeared under my pencil. Since then I’ve tried to draw a bit every day, just to keep my hand in.

My fingers tingled with nervous energy as I went through my supplies, extracting my sketchbook, charcoal and gum eraser before going back to the bed and plumping the pillows into an upright position.

I wanted to draw my husband as I had first seen him, handsome, educated, charming, positively glowing with ambition. I hesitated at the initial stroke, wanting it to be good, if only to prove my value. The charcoal slipped on the first pass and I reached for my eraser, but stopped myself, almost hearing my teachers in my ear, “Loosen up,” “Don’t let it get too precious,” “Look at the edges.” I let the slip stand and moved on, little by little, letting go of my natural impulse for perfection, my hand moving quick and fearless as the lines thinned and thickened, shadows darkening and lightening as I rubbed with my fingers and eraser. Without thinking I put my hand on the coverlet, leaving a nasty black smear on the creamy fabric. In irritation I kicked the coverlet to the end of the bed and kept on drawing.

When the portrait was finished I examined it under the bedside lamp. There it was, the hope I first saw in my husband’s eyes, the promise of a bright future. It was beautiful, perfect, the best work I had ever done. I could put it in a frame and send it to his mother, enchanting her on Christmas morning.

My fingers still itched. Hastily, I pulled the sheet from my sketchbook and let it float to the floor where my husband landed face up, looking at me with so much love in his face. I began to draw him again, smaller this time, the same expression, the same desire. But this time he clung desperately to his possessions, arms spread wide to protect them as the smudgy, indistinct figure of his wife stood in the shadows off to the side, a tiny point of light on her left ring finger picked out with the twisted point of my gum eraser. This time I recognized the drawing as art, something I could sell in a gallery. Tonight my fingers were magic. Again I tore off the sheet and let it float to the floor, overlapping the first.

I drew our house with the rosebushes just before summer’s first bloom, then dropped it to the floor. I drew three children playing in the sprinklers, curly hair and vague features. I copied the room where I sat, focusing on the interplay between light and shadow. Then I thought about Virginia Woolf who said that to write a woman needed a room of her own. So I designed one for myself, different from the tailored navy and gray room I’d decorated to share with my husband, though he preferred to sleep in the den. I drew a big four poster bed and comfy chairs with good reading light, a bookcase with leaded glass doors and a big roaring fireplace. In my mind I could see the colors clearly: dark, rich mahogany for earth, green walls for growth, cream for breath. I held up my drawing. The room looked so free and fertile, a place where I could breathe, but it didn’t look finished. I put the sketchbook back on my lap and added my treasured kimono on the wall opposite the bed. Satisfied, I ripped the drawing from the pad and let it slip among the others.

I put my charcoal back in its case and pulled out a brush and a bottle of black ink, special leak-proof packaging, perfect for travel. Brush and ink were a singular pleasure, a sense of risk, the dangerous drippiness that could ruin everything at the last moment. I painted rapidly, curvy free-flowing lines, mostly fashion poses in fanciful dresses, the faces blank except for large, audacious lips. I couldn’t let these slip to the floor, but carefully laid them flat on every hard surface where they could dry without jeopardizing the carpet.

Dawn began to lighten the sky and I closed my sketchbook, corking the ink and putting my brush in the glass of water my grandmother had left beside my bed. I went around the room gathering my drawings and laid them neatly side by side in three rows before picking out the best and lining them up together. These were good, I knew it. I could hang them on the walls of my living room and when colleagues came over, my husband could say, “My wife’s an artist moonlighting as a receptionist until her career takes off.” When he tired of that, I could commission a private recording of my voice he could play as background for dinner parties:
“My wife’s a singer moonlighting as a receptionist.”
Maybe in a year or two we would own a piano.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the end of the bed as I studied my drawings for long moments, considering them carefully and thinking of all the adults who had pulled my pigtails and chucked my chin, seeing some unknown value before I’d ever had the chance to accomplish a thing. 

Eventually I gathered the drawings into the order they’d been produced and padded out to the family room, my nightgown badly streaked with charcoal and ink. Even the housekeeper was still in bed and the house was silent and chilly. I put two split logs in the fireplace, building a teepee with scraps of kindling and a wad of newspaper. The newspaper lit with the first match and I watched as the flame licked along the edges, traveled to the middle, and began to die down without igniting the kindling. Slowly I lifted the first drawing from the pile, crumpled it without looking and stuffed it next to the newspaper. The flame flared up hungry for the easy kill. I crumpled a second drawing, then a third.