Short Story: La Vie en Rose

With apologies to Edith Piaf and Edna St. Vincent Millay

           It was cloudy, the morning she fell out of love. She usually woke up on her right side, looking at the back of his head, but that morning she woke up on her left side, staring at the cracks in the bedroom window. They had been there since before she’d owned the house. In three years, she’d learned not to see them. Now she wondered how she’d ever forgotten about them—ugly brown scars across the dingy window, distorting the greenery outside. And just like that, she knew it was over.

              I only know the summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more. Edna St. Vincent Millay rang in her hollow head, and the lines throbbed like an empty headache. She got up and made breakfast as usual. Eggs and toast, simple. She flung the eggs around in the pan and toasted the bread til it was black. It was useless. He wouldn’t notice. He never noticed—just read his book or scribbled on his notepad and flashed her a brilliant smile when he was done, toast crumbs quivering in his stubble.

              Delicious, he’d say. Divine, even if the eggs were full of shells and the toast was underdone. And she would smile back, and they’d be in their own world, a world where crunchy eggs and soggy toast were the ideal, where the only thing that mattered was whether he loved her, which he did.               Nothing was different that morning, not really. He ate his rubbery eggs and charcoal toast and invited her in to their secret world with his cozy smile. Somehow, though, the door to that world was closed for her now, and she couldn’t remember how to open it, or how to want to. The best she could offer was a tight smile, and she owed him more than that.

              “We need to talk,” she said, and he put down his book.

              They’d never made promises to each other. That was how they’d wanted it. Life’s too short for “should,” he’d said. We must hold each other in an open hand. That was how he talked—in poems, always. Sometimes it was exhilirating, as if her life had been transformed into a sonnet. Other times, it was exhausting, like when he was too busy having lofty thoughts about the existential nature of beauty to remember to eat, or to pay the electric bill.

              Words were how they’d begun. He had seen her in the bookstore, looking at a book of Millay, and he’d said things like fraught and delicate and can I see you again? Words were how they ended. She stood on one end of the room, arms folded and her voice getting louder the less sure of herself she was, him sinking deeper into a poetic silence. Words poured out of her, like irresponsible and disorganized and get a job. And finally, like a verdict, the shortest word: go.

              It rained the whole drive to work. She felt a hollow place inside her chest, where the sadness should have fit. The radio played only cheerful pop songs, until she was forced to turn the dial to some morose, pouty classical piano. Everything outside was gray and wet, the torrents of rain pelting hard against the windows of her car.

              At the office, Charlene complained about her husband, who wouldn’t let her go bowling on Tuesday nights. Charlene and her husband did not hold each other in open hands. They held each other in iron fists, each squeezing harder until the other was gasping for air. We would never do that, she caught herself thinking, and quickly corrected her pronoun to the singular. The hollow place inside her chest began to fill up with rain water.

              She daydreamed of going somewhere warm all day, while she copied and filed and collated. Tahiti, she thought. Or Hawaii. Gorgeous this time of year. Somewhere without buzzing flourescent lights and the endless, metallic tang of realism and coffee.

              By five, the rain had stopped. Outside, the clouds started to look reluctant, as if there was somewhere else they’d rather be. The first ray of light appeared while she was on her way home, cutting across the gray landscape and revealing a dazzling palette of greens and blues. She rolled down the window and breathed in the smell of wet, clean grass and pavement, the world a toddler fresh out of the bath. The world snapped into focus.

              The door was swinging open in the light breeze when she arrived home. There were papers scattered everywhere, fluttering like moths, trembling in tree branches and trapped against trellises, dampening in the places where they rubbed up against lingering raindrops. There was a rose branch across the threshold, as if in the hours between her departure and her return, the wildly overgrown garden had already attempted to overtake the house. Edith Piaf’s silken growl wound out between the branches of the pear tree and over the flowering jasmine. French lyrics tangled in the bed of French lavender. La Vie en Rose mingled with the timid scent of the sun-warming roses. A ray of sun broke through the oak tree to streak across the slate walkway, catching a trail of golden dust motes in a downward waltz, the first dust to find its way back to the clean, damp ground. O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Millay. It burst out in her, as if her soul had been locked in a broom closet all day by some internal evil stepmother and had only now managed to break down the door.

              She pulled the clip out of her hair and shook it down around her shoulders. The scent of her shampoo, her perfume, caught her off guard, sweet as the garden. Do you think it’s possible to be in love with yourself? She had asked him that, once, at two AM on a wickedly humid morning when sleep was as unnecessary as it was unattainable.

              Yes, he had replied, without pause for thought, his pencil not even ceasing its loose scratching on the legal pad. Essential, in fact. And there he went again, damn him. Turning her subtle jibe at their respective narcissism for fancying themselves artists into some kind of badge of honor, some kind of deeper meaning. He was always doing that, gentle deflections of her self-doubt. He was so sure of himself, to the point of taking himself for granted; she wasn’t sure of anything. What was the word she was looking for? The word to describe something unknowable, something you couldn’t understand. Oscar Wilde said, To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. He was a little like Oscar Wilde, if you thought about it. An American, heterosexual Oscar Wilde. Impossible, intricate, complex. Eternally immature. Irresistibly loveable. And as quickly as it had gone, it was back. The summer, singing in her.

              She plucked one of the papers from the jealous grasp of a sprawling, spoiled baby of a lilac bush. The Last Cigarette, one of her favorites. Written for her, inspired by another early-morning conversation. I wish you’d start smoking, she’d said, so I could tell you to stop. A complicated emotion, wanting to take care of someone, wanting it so much that you’d cripple them just to be their crutch. And he’d turned it into a poem, lines of verse no less cutting and poignant for their charm. That had been at an early point, a premature peak in an unusually warm winter. An insecure place to be, falling in love in a sunny January. Unsettling.

              Her heels came off before she reached the doorstep. She clutched them in the same hand as her oversized bag, the one she usually wore on her shoulder. It had already dropped down, ready to be released, too heavy to be carried another step. She bent down and gingerly moved the rose branch that lay across the doorway aside, then closed her eyes and listened to a few bars of La Vie en Rose, to the longing and resignation of it. It was complacently restrained passion, a woman singing about the pain and beauty of living a contained life in a world that can fill you with more agony and more ecstasy than a human frame should hold. A woman getting used to the idea of living alone, or pretending to get used to it, anyway. It cut her, the inevitability of Edith’s pain. But it wasn’t hers.

              What’s different?

              The garden was rambunctious and untamed as a barefoot child, exactly the same as seven o’clock this morning. The paint on the front door was still chipping as much as it had been at seven o’clock, the maple tree still needed to be pruned as much, and the blackberries had not stopped begging to be beaten back into the untamed wild of Mr. Hamilton’s backyard. She was sure that if she walked back into the bedroom, the cracks in the window would still be there—but she was just as sure that, now, she would not see them. It was all just as irresponsibly verdant as before, yet now she saw how the messy pink mimosa blossoms cluttering the windowsills caught the sunlight, tiny glowing ballerinas taking a rest from their pirouettes.

              She bent over and set her heels and bag inside the door, then balanced against the doorframe and peeled off her stockings, one at a time, the breeze blowing across her calves like a sigh of relief. She tossed the sheer nylons onto the floor, alongside two packed suitcases and a white plastic bag bulging with trash—trash which had, that morning, been scattered all over the new faux-wood laminate floor. The trash bag made her grateful, but the suitcases struck a minor chord inside her. There is no hope without fear. Who had said that? Somebody must have; it was in such need of being said.

              What’s different? He would want to know. It was always words between them, a never ending avalanche of perfect, beautiful words. Of flawed, incomplete words. Of wrong, misconstrued, disastrous words. Just because we write, she thought now, doesn’t mean we know a thing about words. Not the way that really mattered. They only knew how to say things, not how to hear them. They gave words like little gifts, phrases prettily wrapped and proudly presented.

              Your smile, he gave her. It’s like a saxophone solo in a classical symphony.

              And you, she said. Your hands. Like a statue’s hands, like a god’s. Like Eros’ hands.

              Esoteric compliments, conceived and formed by and for them alone, things no one else would understand. When it came time to say the things that really mattered, the plebian, pedestrian, everyday kinds of things, they skipped right over them. What was that word, the word for something you couldn’t understand? The wind picked up and blew past her, into the living room. It stirred the loose papers scattered across the floor, the stragglers, whirling them up into the air. A single sheet flew out past her knees, turning and crinkling, a haphazard white ship with white-knuckled ink passengers.

              She left the door open when she stepped inside, took off her suit jacket and tossed it onto the faded sofa. Papers fluttered near her feet, and she turned to pad down the dim hallway. The bedroom door stood open. Edith was louder here, and she could hear the scratching of the battered record. He hated CDs and considered mp3s an abomination. Only vinyl could hold the heart of the music, he said, and in her opinion, this was not one of the things he was wrong about. She untucked her blouse from her waistband. The hot cotton lay crumpled against the neatly pressed skirt, her skin cooling as the breeze rushed underneath. She pushed the bedroom door open.

              He wasn’t there.

              The room was empty, as empty as it had ever been, including the first day, when all it had held was her. Unfurnished and uncarpeted, a desperate realtor’s nightmare, with a cracked window and mildew on the ceiling, this room had been the final word in the tragedy of the little house with the wild garden. She had come here, full, to an empty place, and felt that irresistible need to fill it with all she had bursting inside her—the hope, the vision, the seventeen cardboard boxes in her parents’ garage. Now she was standing empty in an empty place, and neither of them had anything left to give the other. On the record player by the bed, Edith warbled one last note and the band struck a final chord, and then the room was filled with the gentle static of the blank space after the song.

              And then he was there, as sudden as a perfect ray of sun, emerging from the closet with an armful of socks and underwear. She sagged against the doorway and watched him dump the pile into the obvious suitcase on the bed. How could she have missed the suitcase? He was looking at her, his Eros’ hands hanging helpless at his sides.

              “You’re home,” he said.

              She didn’t say anything.

              “Look, don’t say a word. I’m already gone, so don’t worry.” He dropped a paperback book on top of the pile of clothes already stacked too high in the suitcase. Unfolded, unsorted. Messy.

              She pushed off the doorway and walked toward him. She didn’t know what to say, how to package what she meant in anything but the most mundane, predictable of language. She had no polished pebbles of verbiage to hand over this time, no perfect gift of syllables to give him. And he’d said it himself. Don’t say a word. They were two people to whom words were everything, and words had let them down. So she slipped her fingers into the gaps in her blouse and slid plastic buttons out of their cheap cotton buttonholes and just kept moving forward. He was watching her, perfectly still, his face revealing nothing. Enigmatic, she thought. The word for not knowing. She reached him and shrugged off her blouse, standing in front of him in her plain white bra and grey work skirt.

              What’s different? If he wasn’t wondering, he should have been. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his left collarbone, the ridge of bone covered by the familiar red t-shirt, slowly angling herself into the space in him that was carved out for her. The window was open, so what did it matter if it was cracked? It could be entirely shattered for all she cared. The breeze was bringing in jasmine and honeysuckle— and, she thought, a hint of wild, flying paper. Her fingers found his fingers and coaxed them back into the familiar coupling. World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! The sun was setting now, the rays almost gone, and the needle slipped off the record completely, even the static falling into silence.