It was spring and the plants were starting to grow. One of the things, not the only thing, but one of the things I enjoyed was looking out that old window. It was old and thin, and so the glass of the window had become like a sheet of water, like something fluid that almost seemed to be moving. And actually it was moving. The molecules of glass in a window do actually move over time, and instead of the seeming solidity of the glass, I was seeing the fluid. And through this fluid pane I was watching the green beginning of the season, the old maple tree in our yard and the ailanthus trees in the neighbor’s yard, and I had in my hand a plate, a forsythia-patterned plate that she’d bought — that she wanted and we both bought — and I was brushing the crumbs into a pile on the plate, then pressing my finger into the renegade crumbs and eating them. In this way I was cleaning the plate.
And when the plate left my hands I didn’t feel as if I was throwing it out the window. Not because it didn’t feel like throwing, but because it didn’t feel like me. Not who I thought I was, anyway. Some other me, I thought. And yet it was me. I did throw it. And the glass shattered, more than I would have expected, and the plate continued on its outbound trajectory, passing through the window and disappearing into the backyard. I could feel the cold air being sucked into the warm house, or the warm air being sucked out into the cold, either way it had a cooling effect. The cold air that used to be outside was now surrounding me, and although it was getting cold, it wasn’t me getting cold. I’d had enough of keeping the air out and the cold out and all the things I hated out, and now, like a huge inhalation, I’d taken the outside and brought it in, leaving me sitting there, looking through a broken window. I sat in my chair experiencing the transfer of air, feeling the temperature lowering against my skin, degree by degree, unable or unmotivated to do anything but notice it.
Or maybe I didn’t notice it. Maybe I didn’t feel the cold. Maybe a kind of pride allowed me to sit there and see what I wanted to see, see myself as what I wanted to be. Sitting at the table in the cold air, looking at the baby faces strewn across the table, maybe everything seemed fine or normal. The article I was working on was an attempt to make the difficulty of a baby’s first year seem normal, to pacify and reassure and inform the readers (in that order) so as to create a world of acceptable reality and situate the reader safely in that world. A world I knew nothing about, by the way, a world of vomit and diapers that I had only talked about with Anne. And in the same way that I was manufacturing information about babies, I was manufacturing a belief for myself. Sitting at that round table I came to believe in what I thought of as a realization: the realization that Anne had been kidnapped. I imagined what had happened, and then talked myself into a belief in this version of events. Which relieved my agitation somewhat, and would have relieved it completely, except that now something had to be done.
I called the police but of course they told me there was nothing they could do. I said I wanted to report a missing person but they told me that their hands were tied, that I should sit tight and that my wife would eventually show up. I called Anne’s mother again and again no answer, and although I didn’t quite know what it was, I knew I had to do something. So I found some duct tape, gathered together most of the shattered pieces of window, and by taping the broken glass in the approximate location it had been before, I fixed the window, making it, not good as new, but at least, as the day worked its way to its eventual end, there was action and movement, and although I was tired of being in my body, by fixing the window I was able to find a little normalcy. I wanted normalcy and so I interpreted the window breaking as a normal thing, saw the kidnapping of Anne as a normal thing, or at least a real thing. And I would deal with what had happened.
The odd thing was, as I sat in my chair looking at the duct tape repair job, I had no recollection of throwing the dish. As if some force had acted on me. In my memory the dish just seemed to fall, not down but out, at an angle, so that in falling, instead of hitting the floor, it flew like a thing with a mind of its own, into the window, as if trying to fly through the window, like a bird, blind to the pane of glass.
3
At this point the fellow who was never at a loss was at a loss. I wanted to change something bad into something else, and I attempted to do this by drinking bourbon from a bottle with a faux wax seal, or possibly a real wax seal, it didn’t matter because either way, there I was, four o’clock in the afternoon, drinking hard liquor as a way to stop what was happening. Although I normally would have listened to the public radio station, I didn’t. I closed my windows, shut my shutters, and pulled a wool watch cap over my ears to quell the sound of the cars outside, preferring instead to concentrate on what was happening inside, my heartbeat for instance. I would have liked, if possible, to excise myself from the outside world, or at least to push that world, with its radios and telephones and honking cars, as far away as possible, to do nothing but sit in the solid wooden chair (what I called my lawyer’s chair) looking out the broken window and become like a plant in the garden, my hair growing and my nails growing and that’s about it.
Except that I had to do something.
I’d fixed the window. I’d stanched the flow of warm air out of the house but I still hadn’t stopped what was happening. I still had to move forward, in some direction, and because I didn’t know what that direction might be, the only thing I could think of was to take a nap. Not nap, but lie down on the bed. Doing so, I thought about Anne and how we used to lie on that same bed, warming each other, my legs over hers, or hers on mine, and the sweetness of this memory was something I could only take so long — the fact that it was only memory, that all I had was memory, was painful — and then I got up, made coffee, sat in my lawyer’s chair looking across the photos on the table to the empty chair in front of me. I imagined Anne, sitting as usual, her back straight, her feet wiggling, and it took some time before I realized that I couldn’t keep talking, in my mind, to an empty chair.
So I walked upstairs and started looking around, first in the bedroom and then in her closet. She had a separate closet and her dresses and tops were all lined up. Stacks of shoe boxes were on the floor, and there were sweaters and scarves and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It’s funny how we sometimes act out the old banal clichés, because as I was standing there smelling the smells of the closet I leaned in and touched my lips to one of her dresses, a silk dress that I’d bought for her and given to her, and although she always said she liked it, she’d never worn it. In a box on the top shelf was her wedding dress, folded in tissue paper.
She had a small room in the middle of the top floor that she called her office. It had a skylight and a desk and I looked in the drawers of the desk. All her tax returns and receipts and operating manuals were filed in orderly manila folders. In the receipt file I found a yellow paid bill for a tune-up, from the Trinidadian mechanics we used. The date on the receipt was just six days earlier. She hadn’t said anything about tuning the car, or that it needed tuning, but there was the receipt.