There was plaster on his hands and on the sheets, on the curtains and on his trousers and shirt. Each morning, when the maid came, she would, shaking her head, rub at the curtains with a damp cloth and change the sheets. As the day wore on, as night came, while glancing at his wife, while mangling the plaster figures, he continued to think of her, the maid, rubbing at the curtains, shaking her head. In the bed, he stared at the ceiling and waited for morning, and listened to his wife’s breath catch, and thought about the maid, rubbing and shaking, shaking and rubbing, and, suddenly, somehow, he was asleep, decently for the first time in many nights. He knew it only because just as suddenly he was awake and light was pouring into the room and the maid was shaking him, trying to shake him out of the bed so as to help her change the sheets. He had been awake, then awake again, with nothing in between, and no memory of anything, almost as if dead, he thought, and then thought, no, and then thought simply that there was no way to know, no as if when it came to being dead. The maid untucked the sheet and pushed it to the center of the bed and then put the new sheet on the half of the bed that was now bare, his half. The maid’s face, he saw, was the same as it had been yesterday, same as it had been the day before. Only his wife’s face was changing. Unless his own face were changing too. He had no mirror, not in the room; there was a mirror in the bathroom, but it was affixed to the wall, screwed into place, and what he needed was to see his face here, in the room, beside his wife. He put his hands under his wife and rolled her onto one shoulder and then over onto her stomach and then over onto the other shoulder, and then held her there while the maid got the old sheet all the way off and tugged the new sheet on. His wife’s breathing was fainter now. She hadn’t reacted to being rolled about on the bed. Bauer wondered if she would react if he kept rolling her, rolled her off the bed and around the room, perhaps even out into the hall and into the bathroom, where the mirror was, where he could look in the mirror. But no, that was a crazy thought, and he tried not to think it again as he went about rolling his wife back into her usual place.
The air was wrong, he was still certain the air was wrong, but he was no longer certain it mattered. He mixed the plaster without scraping out the bucket first, and there were, as a result, in the plaster, hard clumps and bits of crust. He stared at his wife. Her face, he thought, was different than it had been a day prior, more settled. The fragile beauty of the skull, the tongs of the jawbones, the grooves of the teeth: all almost seemed to show through the skin, and he felt he should be somehow terrified, but he was not. There was a calm to the room, he realized, as he continued idly to mix the plaster with his hands, but he could not have said why. As he continued to feel it, the sense of calm, he wondered Have I changed? Am I wearing a different face? No, he thought, I have always had the same face. But did it finally really matter? Even if he had the same face, he had entered a new space, he thought: being with this woman who was dying had put him up against life in a different way, but perhaps muffled him, or perhaps simply revealed that what he had always seen as sharp and clear — what the eye saw — was hardly clear at all. It was, he told himself, the inauguration of a new aesthetic moment, a sign perhaps that his ability to work with plaster had returned. Yet when he began to work with the armature, the plaster went on clomped and crusted and would do no more for him than it had done before, and he knew that he would get no further, and he wondered if he would ever get any further. And it was in thinking these thoughts that he realized, with a start, that what he was hearing — or rather not hearing — was his wife’s breath no longer catching in her throat.
Uneasy, he turned away from the sill and put his hand on her neck. But no, he could still feel blood torpidly pulsing, and when he slid his hand between the sheet and her chest, he could feel that her heart, too, was beating as well.
He sat watching her. Did he love her? he wondered. The question seemed somehow irrelevant, for it was now a question not of love but of both of them being in the same room together, the air bad, one of them with a face that was changing and continuing to change from instant to instant, the other with a face that changed not at all. It was the only relevant connection, if it was a connection at all. On her neck he could see the white daubs left by the plaster on his fingers, his white fingerprints like strangulation marks, and there were daubs of plaster on his clothing and on the drapes and on the sheets, too, and perhaps all over the room, and for a moment he thought that now what he should do was to spread plaster over her face and preserve it, not a death mask but a dying mask, but he knew that by the time the plaster hardened there would be an altogether different face underneath. He started for a moment to see if he could model the face in plaster, but he had lost his ability to work with plaster, plaster wouldn’t do, it was the wrong medium, and in the end he went down the hall and washed his hands in the bathroom sink. And when he came back, he took up pencil and paper and began to draw.
In an instant, almost immediately, he had captured her profile, almost too easily somehow, yet when he looked at her again he saw it was not the same face and he drew it again, on top of the first profile. He kept drawing, adding to the profile the rest of her and the bed, and he kept drawing, the lines multiplying. He watched the head of his wife being transformed, the nose becoming sharper, the cheeks growing more and more gaunt, the open, almost immobile mouth seeming to breathe less and less. He kept drawing. He had never really seen his wife, he realized, and he realized further something that unsettled him, that he wasn’t seeing her now. But there was nothing for it but to keep drawing. Toward evening, he was seized by a sudden panic in the face of her oncoming death, and looking down at the paper he realized, through the haze of lines, that every image was being destroyed but in that destruction something was arising unlike anything he had ever seen. A bed, a harrow of lines, the many ghosts of his wife, and all of them somehow, in their erasures and obscurements, beginning to add up to his wife herself. He kept drawing, trying to bring her out. But she was dead; there was no longer anything to bring out. He hesitated, trying not to look at her, looking instead at his own solitary and solid hand, afraid to let go of his pencil, wondering what line he could possibly bear to draw next.
Helpful
It was a freak accident, a wire snapping off the load and whipping back to slash across his face, breaking his nose, tearing open both his eyes. They took him jouncing in the back of a pickup truck to the hospital, where a doctor packed the nose with cotton and straightened it while another doctor removed first the right eye, then the left. Two days later, his wife came to get him and helped him out to the car, and drove him home.