“It’s the fertilizer,” he says. “The smell will dissipate once I spread it.” Though he’s sitting at the kitchen table across from Margaret, his thoughts are elsewhere, out in his work space, where he’d just gotten started before she knocked to tell him that dinner was getting cold and to come inside.
“Fertilizer in the winter?” she asks, spooning the last of the green beans onto his plate. She’s been complaining about the smell around the outside of the house.
“Yes, in the winter. The nutrients go down into the soil. You want to do it before the spring,” he says.
“I don’t remember you doing it in the winter before—”
“Well, I have,” he says, and that is the end of it. He spent time on farms growing up, so she won’t debate him about things like that.
“Maybe I do remember, come to think of it,” she says.
They’d eaten the last of the flank steak, which was a little tough, stringy and flavorful, just the way he likes it. He doesn’t care for filet or other soft cuts of meat. If he is eating flesh, he wants to know it.
Margaret turns from the sink and takes a folded piece of paper from the bulletin board. He recognizes it.
“What’s this?” she asks as she unfolds it, crossing over to him. “I found it in your jacket pocket.”
It is a preliminary sketch of his installation in Northwestway Park.
“Nothing, just a doodle,” he says.
“Are those supposed to be limbs?” she asks, concerned. “And these resemble breasts …”
“No, no. I told you, it’s nothing.”
“It looks familiar somehow …” she muses.
“Maybe I saw it on TV, on the news,” he says. “That’s why I drew it.” Then he snatches the page away from her and crumples it up.
Margaret shrugs and clears the last of the plates. Her back is to him as she bends over the sink.
What does she know? he wonders for the second time in the last little while. Has she been in the garage? he asks himself.
He stands up from the table, a wooden-handled steak knife in his palm, and considers her back as he walks toward her. He stands there for a long time, feeling the knife’s grip under his fingers, looking at her. Nothing could be easier, or clearer. But he isn’t really moved to it. Finally, he sighs and drops the knife into the sink to be washed with the remaining utensils, and then he moves off to the closet and finds what he is looking for.
“Where are you going with your camera?” Margaret asks, the dish towel over her shoulder.
“Out to shoot a project I’m working on.”
“I want to see one of your projects one of these days,” she says.
“We’ve done that, haven’t we?” he says, recalling a time many years ago, before they’d moved to this house, when she’d entered his darkroom unbidden, letting light in and exposing a batch of film he was processing. The utterly berserk way in which he’d reacted to that, the terror he’d seen in her, reminds him that going into his work space is not something she’ll ever do again. She wouldn’t dare. Even now he sees her gaze fall to her feet.
He pauses to straighten a portrait of the house that he’s taken, a gelatin silver print matted directly onto a block of wood. Occasionally he shoots buildings or landscapes to give credibility to his claim of being a shutterbug and provide the ostensible reason he needs all his equipment and supplies.
“They’re not very good anyway, just something I do,” he says. He is lying. His real projects are very good. They are amazing, unlike anything ever created by man.
“Wood or metal this time?” she asks.
“Well …” he says, when the phone rings.
“I’ll get that,” she says.
“Thanks,” he says, and continues out to the garage.
He works with total concentration, and skill built upon thousands of hours of contemplation and hundreds of hours of experience. He can’t stop and he can’t bring himself to go to bed. He loses all track of time. He works in a coat, the heater in the garage turned off, the winter cold outside chilling the air. He moves his hands over her velvet flesh, her still-pliant viscera. He has his saws and sharp knives. The textures and aromas are almost overwhelming. He positions the elements into the perfect composition and he shoots the whole thing with his camera placed in just the right position. It will soon be time to go out.