I was stunned. I had never imagined such words. I saw your mouth moving, I heard not words but sounds, strangulated sounds, you backed away from me, your face was contorted with dislike.
I told you then: I could not let you go. Would not let you go. For how could I, you are my wife.
Remembering how on a snowy morning some months before, in late winter, you’d entered my study in my absence and propped up a valentine on the window sill facing my desk. For often you did such things, playful, childlike, not seeming to mind if I scarcely noticed, or, noticing, paid much attention. The valentine came in a bright red envelope, absorbed in my work somehow I hadn’t noticed. Days passed and I did not notice (evidently) and at last you came into my study to open the envelope for me laughing in your light rippling way (that did not sound accusing, only perhaps just slightly wounded) and you drew out of the red envelope a card of a kind that might be given to a child, a kitten peeking out of a watering can and inside a bright red TO MY VALENTINE. And your name. And I stared at this card not seeming to grasp for a moment what it was, a “valentine,” thrust into my face for me to admire.
Perhaps I was abrupt with you then. Or perhaps I simply turned away. Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent. The maddened buzzing of flies is a kind of silence, I think. Like all of nature: the blind devouring force to which Schopenhauer gave the name will.
Your promise was, at the time of our marriage, you would not be hurt. You would not be jealous of my work, though knowing that my work, as it is the best part of me, must always take priority over my personal life. Freely you’d given this promise, if perhaps recklessly. You would not be jealous of my life apart from you, and you would not be hurt. Bravely pledging I can love enough for both of us!
And yet, you never grasped the most elemental logistics of my work. The most elemental principles of philosophy: the quest for truth. Of course, I hardly expected you, lacking even a bachelor’s degree from a mediocre land-grant university, to understand my work which is understood by very few in my profession, but I did expect you, as my wife, to understand that there can be no work more exacting, exhausting, and heroic.
But now we are beyond even broken promises. Inside our house, your valentine is waiting.
As a younger man only just embarked upon the quest of truth, I’d imagined that the great work of my life would be a definitive refutation of Descartes, who so bluntly separated “mind” and “body” at the very start of modern philosophy, but unexpectedly in my early thirties my most original work has become a corroboration and a clarification of the Cartesian position: that “mind” inhabits “body” but is not subsumed in “body.” For the principles of logic, as I have demonstrated by logical argument, in a systematic geometry in the mode of Spinoza, transcend all merely “bodily” limitations. All this, transmuted into the most precise symbols.
When love dies, can it be revived? We will see.
On the front stoop you will ring the doorbell. Like any visitor.
Not wishing to enter the house by the side door, as you’d done when you lived here.
Calling in a low voice my name: “Daryll?”
How strange, Daryll is my name. My given name. Yet I am hardly identical with Daryll and in the language of logic it might even be claimed that I am no thing that is Daryll though I am simultaneously no thing that is not-Daryll. Rather, Daryll is irrelevant to what I am, or what I have become.
No answer. You will try the door knocker. And no answer.
How quiet! Almost, you might think that no one is home.
You will take out your house key, carried inside your wallet, in your purse. Fitting the key into the lock you will experience a moment’s vertigo, wishing to think that the key no longer fits the lock; that your furious husband has changed the locks on the doors, and expelled you from his life, as you wish to be expelled from his life. But no, the lock does fit. Of course.
Pushing open the door. A heavy oak door, painted black.
Unconsciously you will have expected the interior of the stolid old dark-brick house to be coolly air-conditioned and so the shock of over-warm, stale air, a rancid-smelling air seems to strike you full in the face. “Hello? Daryll? Are you…”
How weak and faltering, your voice in your own ears. And how your nostrils are pinching at this strange, unexpected smell.
Rancid-ripe. Sweet as rotted fruit, yet more virulent. Rotted flesh?
Please forgive!
Can’t return. Not for more than an hour.
It was my fault, I had no idea…
…from the start, I think I knew. What a mistake we’d both made.
Yes I admit: I was flattered.
…young, and ignorant. And vain.
That you, the most brilliant of the younger professors in the department…
Tried to love you. To be a wife to you. But…
Just to pack my things. And what I can’t take with me, you can give to Goodwill. Or throw out with the trash.
…the way they spoke of you, in the department. Your integrity, your genius. And stubborn, and strong…
If I’d known more! More about men. Like you I was shy, I’d been afraid of men, I think. A virgin at twenty-five…
No. I don’t think so.
Even at the beginning, no. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I ever did, Daryll. It was a kind of…
…like a masquerade, a pretense. When you said you thought you loved me. Wanting so badly to believe…
Please, Daryll? Can you? Forgive?
…only just time enough to pack a few things. The divorce can be finalized by our lawyers, we won’t need to meet again.
The most brilliant young philosopher of his generation, they said of you. And he is ours…
This masquerade. “Marriage.”
So badly I wanted to be your wife. I am so ashamed!
Daryll? Can you forgive me?
Standing in the doorway of the living room you will see to your astonishment that sheets — bedsheets? — have been carefully drawn over the furniture, like shrouds. One of the smaller Oriental rugs has been rolled up and secured with twine as if in preparation for being hauled away. Books have been removed from the shelves that cover most of two walls of the living room and these books have been neatly placed in cardboard boxes. At the windows, blinds have been tightly drawn shut. Flies buzz and bat against the slats. There’s a green twilit cast to the air as if the house has sunk beneath the surface of the sea.
The smelclass="underline" What is it? You think Something that has spoiled, in the kitchen?
You will not venture into the kitchen at the rear of the house.
Though you enter the dining room, hesitantly. Seeing on the long oaken table a row of manila folders each neatly marked in black ink: FINANCES, BANK RECORDS, IRS & RECEIPTS, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.
You will begin now to be frightened. Panic like flames begins to lick at you.
And that sound: murmurous and buzzing as of muffled voices behind a shut door.
“Daryll? Are you — upstairs?”
Telling yourself Run! Escape!
Not too late. Turn back. Hurry!