This is an updated, extended and more realized version of a first draft of this post from last March.
She made a monocle out of the house key ring and stared at him for several minutes, succeeding—but just barely—at suppressing fits of gleeful, childlike laughter while waiting for him to look up at her, having felt the pull of her gaze, but he never did. He had moved his work out into the dining room earlier that week, finding that the long mahogany table was better suited to his blueprints than to dinner parties with four other couples. His gaze was intense and steady; steely gray eyes scanned the pages, never once giving a thought to the woman at the other end of the table. When she realized he wasn’t interested in her game, she pretended to engage in his. Taking a pen from the front pocket of her apron, she sketched a five-sided house the size of a half dollar on a corner of the nearest page of blueprint paper, and on the inside of the little house she drew a heart, incessantly retracing the two lines, leftsiderightsideleftsiderightside, until the rhythm of it all had created a hum in her brain.
Pausing, with her pen anchored to the bottom point of the heart, she looked along the length of the table.
“Y’ever think maybe…that maybe it’s getting to be a good time…I mean, it’s been two years now and you’re doing well at work…and most married people by now, you know…” He had yet to look up, but she could tell from the quickening pace of the puffs of smoke issuing from his pipe that now wasn’t the time to bring it up. She wasn’t even convinced she wanted what she was trying to sell him. She only knew that she was supposed to want children at this time in her life and marriage, that this was what all women her age were doing, and that they were happy about it. She merely assumed it was something she had to mention because, well, it concerned him too.
She let the silence cloud her eyes and instead pictured a scene from five years before when she had first met him, standing outside the university library, smoking a cigarette and wearing a lightweight trench coat in the mid-February freeze. She’d assumed then that he was some kind of artist, too poor to afford adequate outerwear and such the thinking-man as to transcend the temperature, to find warmth among the sunlight of his musings. Enchanted, she’d asked him for a cigarette, which he lit for her with a match plucked from a matchbook bearing the name of a nearby literary café. She didn’t realize then that he was the one who was supposed to be enchanted by her, nor did it ever occur to her that he was actually quite cold—painfully in fact—standing there in a trench coat or that his favorite book was No Time for Sergeants, with Stone’s Love Is Eternal a close second.
When he had first seen her, with those bright eyes and straight teeth, he’d immediately pictured her assimilating nicely within the designs he had laid out. She had great potential, just like a vacant lot between Spring Garden and South Streets. Her demeanor implied that she was full of stories, a great conversationalist, which would come in handy at promotion time, when the boss would need to be plied by perfectly planned five-course meals. She was stately, and only a little wild: the box pleats on her skirt were perpendicular to her patent-leather belt, which he could only see because she had forgotten—or neglected—to button her winter coat, an oversight that had given her the likeness of a bird in flight as she ascended the stairs to the library. Her hands were slender and white, and she waved them around while she spoke, as though directing a dance of imaginary moths. He could barely suppress the flutter of surprise that came into his voice when she perched next to him and asked for a cigarette.
Through the smoke screen between them she could tell he was dazed and seemed to be a little annoyed. “You remind me exactly of my father,” she said, a glimmer of amusement entering her voice. “He never had much to say either.” He wasn’t sure what to make of such a comment so he kept quiet, pondering the weeds coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk.
She let out a lengthy stream of smoke. “He’s actually why I started smoking in the first place. But he smoked a pipe. I wanted to smoke a pipe too, but every time my mother caught me fiddling with one she would hand me a cigarette from this really ornate cigarette case she always kept in her evening clutch. She didn’t even smoke. Huh.” She paused, remembering, realizing. “I guess I really started smoking because of my mother. Cigarettes, anyway.” Seeing no reaction either way from her new companion, she continued. “But that damn pipe of my father’s… I stayed by his side every evening while he smoked it, waiting for him to impart some golden advice or wisdom, y’know? I really believed in what that pipe was supposed to mean. A man smoking a pipe was clearly a cultured man. But he just sat there, like it didn’t matter.” She had forgotten her audience, the cigarette between her fingers turning to ash.
“Stodgy. Your father must have been a bit stodgy.”
Her eyes suddenly sparkled in ecstasy, and she let out a quick laugh. “Stodgy! That’s him exactly. Brilliant…”
He had switched over to smoking a pipe shortly after their wedding, about a month after they’d moved here from Philadelphia. She had dropped out of college when they’d married—which was fine because she’d assumed she would have more time to paint independently—and he’d taken up smoking a pipe. In a daze, she watched him puffing in and out until his image had become a watercolor, and she thought of that painting. This is not a pipe, it said to her, poking her in the ribs like something was supposed to be funny, a joke. But it is a pipe, right? She knew that it was a pipe. Anyone would agree to that. It may have been a painting of a pipe, but why should that strip the image of its name? It was her stubbornness that kept her from giving in to the artist’s meaning. She wanted to believe that images could speak truths, that people were who they pretended to be and that each mother pushing a baby in Central Park really did have everything her smile implied.
When he set the pipe down to get a better look at his work, she went over to the coat tree, sending random thoughts his direction as she walked through the apartment. “Did you know the human heart will continue to beat even after it’s been separated from the body? Granted, it has to have an oxygen supply, but just think: it doesn’t need us! How about those Cubans? Do you think they’re full of it or are we all going to self-destruct?” He never replied, and she began to wonder if she’d said anything at all. “I’d like to go to Cuba, I think. Drink rum and smoke cigars…” she whispered to herself as she thumbed the collar of her husband’s trench coat.
She took the coat from the tree, trading it for her apron. In pen she inscribed her cigarette pack with the line, This is not a cigarette, leaving them there in exchange for the pouch of pipe tobacco she would be leaving with. On her hand she wrote, This is not a life, laughing at the double meaning of it. And foregoing the necessary umbrella, she slipped out of the apartment wearing only the lightweight trench coat. Turning the corner where their building stood, she stepped into the oncoming traffic, blurred out between the drops of rain.
If he heard her leaving, he made no movements, instead focusing on the task in front of him, looking up only when he smelled the casserole burning in the oven.
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