Page 16 of Fox
She comes down a half hour later.
She has one bag—a large duffel.
It’s a dark green canvas, with a white stripe, lived-in in the way her things tend to be, used until they’re useful rather than replaced when they’re merely old.
She’s been crying. I can see it on her face. In her eyes.
Fuck! I hurt her. Iamhurting her. This is not what I wanted.
I want to say something, anything, but I know there is nothing to say.
I learned that once before, the night we came home from the hospital after she lost the baby, when I stood there trying to findthe right words, and she looked at me with an expression that said what we both knew: that I couldn’t assuage her any more than I could myself. She’s looking at me the same way now.
I straighten from where I’ve been leaning against the kitchen doorway.
“You’re going to Dina’s.”
“Fox.” She says my name the way she does when I’m stating the obvious, a syllable that contains a whole sentence’s worth of “you know the answer to that.”
She sets the bag down by the front door and comes back through the hall. I watch her do a sweep of the downstairs the way she always does before she leaves—checking things, the unconscious domestic circuit she runs every time she walks out the door of our house, that she has run her hands over every corner of since she moved in, since we married.
She stands in front of me and looks me in the eyes.
She’s not angry. I think I would prefer that. She’s sad, and that hurts me; that makes me want to wrap my arms around her, care for her, and take the pain away.
“The ragu will keep for three days. Don’t let it go past that.”
The stone in my chest drops another ten feet.
“Lucy—“
“The fig tree needs water. I did it today, but it needs it every other day until the heat breaks.”
The damn tree that she wanted so badly.
Fuck!
“I know how to water a?—“
“I know you do.” A pause. “I’m just saying.”
She’s wonderful.
That’s what I think, standing in my own front hall while my wife is leaving me—she is wonderful, in the specific, irreducible way of people who are exactly who they are all the way through, without caveat.
“You don’t have to go tonight.” I hear the plea in my voice, the one I never thought I would have.
She smiles like it’s costing her.
“I’m not asking you to stay,” I continue evenly. “I just mean you could?—”
“I know what you mean.” She picks up the duffel. “It’s too painful.” She says it simply, without inflection, the way she says things that are true and don’t require decoration. “Being here right now is too painful. You can understand that, right?”
Now, she’s pleading with me to see her, feel her pain.
I do. I fucking do.
I understand it the way I understand most things about Lucy—completely, and with the particular helplessness of a man who comprehends a thing and cannot do anything useful with that comprehension.
