Sitting here I can see Thespa’s cup, the cup from which Thespa drank coffee. I would like to say that I see a smudge of lipstick on the rim, though Thespa was not wearing lipstick. If I were to get up from the chair and go sit on the sofa, I would be where she sat while she drank the coffee. There is still a slight indentation in the cushion where Thespa sat. She is slim, but she is a womanly slim, and her buttocks have made a larger indentation than mine would, I believe, were I to sit there, though I am taller than Thespa. When I kissed her, back when I did that, she would tilt her head up to bring her mouth against mine, because I am taller. There has been a time, during the worst of it, when I closed my eyes and imagined kissing Thespa. Sitting where Thespa sat, were I to do that, getting up from the leather chair in which I am sitting, have been sitting for hours, and going over to the sofa, I could find out if she has left a little coffee in her cup, verify what I know already even without getting up from my chair, that she has not finished her coffee, because Thespa never finishes anything. She leaves behind, as relics of her passages, crusts of sandwiches, half-read novels, curdled milk, fizzed-out cola, starving cats, unsigned checks, unkept promises, inchoate projects, and questions hanging in the air like a last whiff of perfume. Were I to go over and sit there, sit next to where she sat, and place my hand on the sofa beside me, in the indentation where she sat, I might imagine still feeling the warmth of Thespa, though it has been hours since she sat there, and the fabric would be harsh and cold, like the absence of Thespa, and I would lift the cup and drink the last swallow of her coffee, which would taste of her breath.
By going over and sitting where Thespa sat, I would disturb a fly that is walking on the little piece of cake she has left on the plate next to her cup, a fragment of a small ingot-shaped lemon poppy-seed cake that I bought this morning at the bakery where I buy bread on Mondays and Thursdays. In the kitchen, conscious of Thespa waiting on the sofa to hear what I had to say, hands folded in her lap the way she always sits when she does not intend to listen, feeling her waiting as a kind of judgment upon me, as if only a fool would drag out this moment with coffee and cake, I sliced two small pieces from the cake and put them on matching white plates that I carried in with the two coffees on a lacquered wooden tray that is now on the floor next to the table on which the nearly empty cup and plate are sitting.
It is a rattan table with a glass top. The trees on the hill outside the tall window are reflected upside down in the glass. There are clouds as well, puffy white clouds moving softly across the surface of the glass, as they move across the surface of the sky. They must be upside down as well, though that does not seem to matter. Had I looked at the tabletop earlier, I might have seen Thespa there, walking away under the trees, upside down as if she were walking on the ceiling. It has always been like that, Thespa walking away across the ceiling of my world, though I never thought of phrasing it that way until now.
If I were to get up from the chair and go out the door and stand under the trees, I would be reflected upside down in the table as well. If someone were to come in while I was still standing there under the trees, a policeman, perhaps, summoned by neighbors, or the landlord wondering why the rent has not been paid, and sit where I am now sitting, he or she would see the empty cup and plate on the table, the lacquered tray on the floor, the small indentation in the sofa cushion, and a man upside down beneath the trees, weeping, but he (or she) would not know what to make of it, would not be able to supply the thoughts that belong to those things. Only Thespa can do that. If Thespa had come back while I was standing where she had stood, where she had paused a moment under the trees to look back at the house before turning again and walking briskly away, and had sat in the chair where I am sitting now, she would gather the objects, the cup, the plate, the lacquered tray, into her thoughts, the way she used to, in the evening, gather her book, her comb, her phone, her toothbrush, her shawl into her arms before climbing the stairs to bed.
It is almost dark now. The coffee table, the cup, the saucer are dimly visible. The fly is not walking on the cake crumbs anymore, and it is not on the windowpane. If I got up and went over, I might find it floating in the sweet brown puddle Thespa has left at the bottom of her cup, and where the fly, its wings wet and sticky, unable to climb the slippery wall of the cup, swam as long as it could before drowning.
I could also just leave the cup and the crumbs for other flies, for the maid who will come in two days and clean them up. She will come in and go directly to the kitchen, where she will take off her coat and drape it over one of the four chairs in there. She will go around the house gathering up the cups and glasses and carry them into the kitchen and sweep up the shattered glass in there. She will pick up the clothes Thespa has left scattered in the bedroom and bathroom and throw them in the hamper in the bathroom. She will do the dishes and vacuum. She will arrange the four chairs in the kitchen neatly at the four sides of the table before putting on her coat and leaving.