I’m afraid that I have made some fundamental error.
I worry that I did not look at Tess correctly. Have not. Through all the years together, and then from here, too, from afar, in all these increments of recollection.
What is the nature of this error?
I’m not certain.
Is it something to do with the way that I observed her? Something to do with beauty, with the effect her body had on me. To do, even, with the words themselves.
Beautiful, for one.
Think of the way I saw her in the bathroom that sad afternoon. The light on her breasts. The slope of her back, her thighs, her calves, her narrow ankles. All the rest I’ve described to you. The power she had. Not she, but her body. You see in those descriptions that there are no scars. No blemishes, no hairs trapped beneath her skin. All that body and so little mind. Oh, but that’s not true either. More than anything she exists in me as a force, a heat deep in my spine, a turning in my chest. It is not her physical shape that stirs me most or first. And it never was, not even from the start. It is everything else: will, fire, fury, lust, intelligence, vision, heart, humor, conviction.
I am doomed to this litany, to confusion, to clichés, to dead words.
And yet, and still, the way she appears here to me now so clearly, I see no imperfection. And is that not a kind of tyranny? Haven’t I imprisoned her? Us?
She becomes material so easily—whole and in parts. Her skin, her eyes, her breasts, her shoulders, her mouth, her thighs. I do not mean to do it. But there she is assembling and disassembling.
Here I close my eyes.
The falling line of her throat.
Her feet, which she did not like for their size and flatness.
“Too big,” she said. “So ugly.”
But no, there was nothing ugly.
And I do remember scars.
One thin curve soaring from her hip bone. Left.
A lopsided diamond at her ankle. Left.
The start of a spiral on the meat of her shoulder. Right.
Coming home from somewhere in winter, her eyes red from the cold, nose running, hair a tangle, lips dry and flaking. Or the relentless pimples, which appeared on her chin late into her thirties. The lines at her eyes, and across her forehead. The flecks of grey in her hair.
It was all the same.
Her beauty deepened. I cannot change this, and I cannot avoid the word. For so long, I have tried to make her ugly in body and mind. But there is nothing to be done.
Through all the years we are expected to stop looking at one another, I looked. When abruptly we were no longer young. Through the panic of age, and accelerating time, and deteriorating bodies, through the shock of, the rebellion against, and, at last, the resignation to those things, I watched her. I could not stop and I wonder if there was an error there. A failing somehow. I wonder if through all that watching, I was doing her harm. If to see her always bathed in these golden lights was itself an act of violence. Was it the violence of worship? Have I, all these years, made her something impossible? Inhuman?
But then I remember my frustration, how often I hated her, how often we fought, her stubbornness, her selfishness, her disappearances, physical and otherwise, her cruelty and blindness.
I have not forgotten how anger flowed between us for so many years. That’s all there too and because it is, I believe I have loved her in spite of those things.
I believe I have loved her fairly.