Every Past Thing by Pamela Thompson

Author:Pamela Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2007-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

When Edwin comes in, teeth chattering, hair still wet, he finds Mary asleep, the covers kicked off, her gown loose around the neck. He is amazed to find warmth so expendable. Asleep, no frown or sadness mars her face, and when he bends to kiss her, his bottom lip touches her forehead and his top lip catches her hair: this is how he first kissed her, at the line between flesh and hair, and as then, a few hairs stick to his lips as he pulls himself away.

He has not been the husband his eyes must have promised her. When he went to her, he had been emboldened by Samuel’s example, cocky with the achievement of the house on the hill, absorbed in finishing his self-portrait of Samuel. Yes, self-portrait. Samuel’s was the face he looked at when he arose every morning. To substitute blue eyes for brown a trivial matter. The spirit of the thing—the sketch of Ruskin’s he’d made the background, the American flag he had staked in the ground of European painting—was all him, and not Samuel. It was as if, instead of embodying Samuel in his portrait, he’d taken on something of him in the flesh. Tapping on Mary’s window. As if he would know what to do when she answered. Though it was simple enough, at first.

Samuel has no need of the wine his table offers—the physical ease that escapes Edwin never leaves Samuel. Even without wine, his words flow smoothly. His evident ease with women proven again with Alice, that he should attract a woman so different from himself, so different from his other wife, that even with nothing to say to one another, in fact with a painful obstacle between them—that he loves Maud with the half of his heart he reserves for fatherhood, the half of his heart that will not be brooked, that does not sway or open or close, and that Alice does not care a whit about this part of him or about Maud herself—even with every reason for there to be no connection between them at all, still Samuel finds his way, dogged, across the divide of their two unlikely persons, and something strong passes between them that Edwin sees in Samuel’s twisting of the hairs at her neck, in the way her eyes follow him. What is in Samuel expanse in Edwin shrinks.

It had been easy for him not to bother Mary with his physical needs after she strode down the stairs with an armful of bloody sheets that fall, after they’d closed their house to guests once and for all. What good would come of it?—what steadiness in their household?—for them to swim together in the soup of physical intermingling, the blood and the terrors, the pulsings of such small internal pleasures, the stickiness, the extra wash—all for a little ride, him deep within her, both of them with their eyes shut waiting for a throbbing and shaking at long last. An end of sorts. He took it to be for her as it was for him, though such assumptions are generally mistaken.

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