Green Eyes

  Donnell thought the line should have continued the metaphorical progression and sought a comparative for weeks, but he would not have chosen months or years. Weeks like vats of sluggish sameness, three of them, at the bottom of which he sat and stewed and tried to remember. Jocundra urged him to write, and he refused on the grounds that she had asked. He purely resented her. She wore too damn much perfume, she touched him too often, and she stirred up his memories of Jean because she was also tall and dark-haired. He especially resented her for that. Sometimes he took refuge from her in his memories, displaying them against the field of his suffering, his sense of loss, the way an archeologist might spread the fragments of an ancient medallion on a velvet cloth, hoping to assure himself of the larger form whose wreckage they comprised: a life having unity and purpose, sad depths and joyous heights. But not remembering Jean’s face made all the bits of memory insubstantial. The hooked rugs on the cabin floor, the photograph above their bed of a spiderweb fettering a windowpane stained blue with frost, a day at a county fair. So few. Without her to center them they lacked consistency, and it seemed his grief was less a consequence of loss than a blackness welling up from some negative place inside him. From time to time he did write, thinking the act would manifest a proof, evoke a new memory; the poems were frauds, elegant and empty, and this led him to a sense of his own fraudulence. Something was wrong. Put that baldly it sounded stupid, but it was the most essential truth he could isolate. Something was very wrong. Some dread thing was keeping just out of sight behind him. He became leery of unfamiliar noises, suspicious of changes in routine, convinced he was about to be ambushed by a sinister fate masquerading as one of the shadows that surrounded him. There was no reasonable basis for the conviction, yet nonetheless his fear intensified. The fear drove him to seek out Jocundra, she in turn drove him to thoughts of Jean, round and round and round, and that’s why the weeks seemed like goddamn centuries, and the month - when it came to be a month and a little more -like a geologic stratification of slow, sad time.

  One summerlike afternoon Jocundra wheeled him out to the stone bench nearest the gate and tried to interest him with stories of duels and courtship, of the fine ladies and gentlemen who had long ago strolled the grounds. He affected disinterest but he listened. Her features were animated, her voice vibrant, and he felt she was disclosing a fundamental attitude, exposing a side of herself she kept hidden from others. Eventually his show of boredom diminished her enthusiasm, and she opened a magazine.

  High above, the oak crowns were dark green domes fogged by gassy golden suns, but when he shifted his field of focus he could see up through the dizzying separations of the leaves to the birds perched on the top branches. His vision was improving every day, and he had discovered that it functioned best under the sun. Colors were truer and shapes more recognizable, though they still wavered with a seasick motion, and though the brightness produced its own effects: scroll works of golden light flashing in the corners of his eyes; transparent eddies flowing around the azalea leaves; a faint bluish mist accumulating around Jocundra’s shoulders. He tracked across the glossy cover of her Cosmopolitan and focused on her mouth. It was wide and lipsticked and full like the cover girl’s; the hollow above her lips was deep and sculptural.

  ‘How do I look?’ The lips smiled.

  Being at such an apparently intimate distance from her mouth was eerie, voyeuristic; he covered his embarrassment with sarcasm. ‘What’s up in the world of bust enhancement these days?’

  The smile disappeared. ‘You don’t expect me to read anything worthwhile with you glowering at me, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t expect you could read at all.’ Flecks of topaz light glimmered in her irises; a scatter of fine dark hairs rose from her eyebrow and merged with the hairline. ‘But if you could I assumed it would be crap like that. Makeup Secrets of the Stars.’

 ‘I suffer no sense of devaluation by using makeup,’ she said crisply. ‘It cheers me up to look nice, and God knows it’s hard enough to be cheerful around you.’

  He turned, blinking away the patch of clear sight, considering the blurs of distant foliage. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to maintain anger against her. Almost without his notice, as subtly as the spinning of a web, threads of his anger had been drawn loose and woven into another emotion. Its significance escaped him, but he thought that if he attempted to understand it, he would become more deeply ensnared.

  ‘I have a confession,’ she said. ‘I read through your notebook this morning. Some of the fragments were lovely…’

  ‘Why don’t you just look in the toilet after I go…’

  ‘… and I think you should finish them!’