The End of the Beginning

     Molly stood in front of the dark closet and sighed. She reached into the back and pulled out John's shirt, a muted plaid of teal and brown, celadon and ivory. She poked her finger into the chest pocket like a person probing a tender tooth with her tongue. Of course the scotch tape was still there. It taunted her, “Bad wife, lazy bitch.” It told her she deserved this life of freakish longing. He never mentioned his favorite shirt needed mending; how could she have missed it when she did their laundry? Maybe she didn't.  Could a few well-timed stitches have saved him?

     She pressed her face into the soft flannel. Molly felt shame, but also wonder. After all this time -- three years for her, eternity for him -- his clothes still held the scent of milk soap, cold fresh air. The scent of him. She smelled him with his sleeves rolled up, looking sweetly sexy. She smelled him reading at the dining table, head bent low to accommodate Meowser, always draped around his long smooth neck. She smelled him striding toward her on the sidewalk with his pea-coat collar high against the winter wind, his watch cap pulled low above the crinkly eyes that turned to smiles when they caught sight of her in the evening rush. He'd reach up and rub the hat around, using the dark wool to scratch his warm but itchy forehead. He looked so much like a Danish sailor, yet he'd taken to the sky and not the sea. Had he, in his child-like infatuation with the clouds above, unknowingly broken some natural order? Could that be why it happened? The indignity – crash landing in a landfill. At least Icarus splashed into history.

They'd moved together into a top-floor corner bedroom, where the light was pale and blond, like him. The big back windows opened onto the sky above an urban park with a pretty, squiggly parkway and a big zoo just beyond. Some mornings, when the winds were right, John and Molly could hear the creatures rousing, and squawks and roars and grunts would stir them from their sleep.                                                                              

Another window opened over the garden courtyard between their building and its twin next door. Nell downstairs knew all about the neighborhood; she'd told Molly that the occupant of the apartment directly across from hers was the D.C. correspondent for some big New England newspaper. In the muggy summers, Molly'd open all the windows, desperate for a breeze, and she wondered if the reporter could hear her crying in the night. 

     And if he did? Who the fuck cared? She could see him sitting on the pot. Just his head in profile, but that was enough. He had to know: The layout of their apartments was identical. Why didn't he put up a damn curtain? A shutter, a blind? He'd be there, looking down, illuminated like the subject of some Edward Hopper painting. Molly would try to focus on her space, on the expensive pussy-willow wallpaper that was intended to cheer her, but like a masochist at a horror film with a hand thrown up to shield her face, she was compelled to spread her fingers. She was complicit in disgrace.

     When Molly was out, she would sometimes see the short man with the shiny bowl haircut trudging up the next-door steps with his briefcase, and she couldn't help but think of defecation. Not good. She realized that she never saw him peeing. He must do that sitting too. Not good. But what really wasn't good, what was horrid actually, was that John would have thought this witness-shitting thing was funny, and he wasn't there to make her laugh. He wasn't anywhere for anything; not to eat a banana, or smoke a fatty, or dandle his new niece, or wake up warm all pressed against her, pressed deep inside, where monkeys howled in distant cages.