Freshly showered and shaved, Albie’s hair is wet and he’s got a towel wrapped around his waist. It appears that Bunny is sleeping. On the floor near the couch, Albie spots the apple. He reaches around the coffee table to pick it up, and Bunny’s eyes open like the snap of a window shade. Where the apple has been eaten, the white flesh has turned brown. Bunny gropes for the notepad, and when she locates it safely hidden under the blanket, she rolls over to look at Albie, and she says, “I slept.”
“And you ate.” Albie holds the apple as if were something to contemplate, like Yorick’s skull.
“What time is it?” Bunny asks.
“It’s getting near six. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” she says. “I’m good.” Then she says, “I should take a shower,” and Albie dares to be hopeful. Maybe Muriel was right, maybe this is the beginning of the end.
The hot shower turns her skin pink, and it feels like a gentle massage. Bunny washes away the grime and sweat with a moisturizing liquid body soap. A facial scrub made with granules of apricot seeds exfoliates, like sandpaper, the dead skin cells on her face and neck. After she shampoos her hair, Bunny reaches for the bottle of all-natural, home-brewed hair conditioner, which was a birthday gift from her sister Nicole. Bunny had feared the conditioner contained something like placenta from farm animals or human breast milk. But now, either she doesn’t care, or else she forgot about the possibility of the gross-out factor, and she combs the conditioner through her wet hair. While she waits the advised two minutes before rinsing it out, she cleans her fingernails with Albie’s nailbrush.
The transformation from rancid to clean, particularly after a stretch of feculence, is like being born again, minus Jesus. Praise is not for the Lord, but for the Hydroluxe showerhead.
With one towel wound around her head like a turban and another towel wrapped around her body sarong-style, Bunny roots around in the cabinet under the bathroom sink for the blow-dryer. It’s possible that after using it at last, she put it away elsewhere. She knows that to continue to look is to risk frustration, and frustration is an accelerant when fire is a metaphor for rage. To quit looking for it, to let her hair dry naturally, could be read as a mentally sound decision, and it will be fine. Although, even when all was well, she rarely bothered with the blow-dryer. Her hair is glossy black and thick with a natural wave, and Bunny has always been lazy.
Albie dresses the way he eats. One bite of fish, then a forkful of mashed potatoes, a sip of wine followed by a Brussels sprout or a julienned carrot, then another bite of fish. Now, Bunny finds him sitting on the edge of the bed about to put on one sock. He’ll put on the second sock after he buttons his shirt.
The top dresser drawer is where Bunny keeps her underthings. She pushes aside the pretty black lace bras, the pink chemise, the stockings that require a garter belt. She does not consider the silk panties for the same reason that, when her towel drops to the floor, Albie averts his gaze and, now that his shirt is buttoned, he busies himself with his second sock.
Thus far dressed in a no-frills beige bra and black tights, Bunny stands at her closet, deliberating. Her favorite clothes are the vintage things she’s found at flea markets and thrift stores. Dresses and jackets and hats and gloves and shawls from the 1920s and ’30s, eras long before she was born, when women’s clothes were unmistakably feminine; clothes made of velvet and lace and silk and chiffon, clothes that move with a woman’s body like liquid silver.
Albie asks Bunny, as he always does, which tie should he wear, which of his ties would go well with his suit. Bunny goes to his closet where his ties, wild with color and kaleidoscopic in patterns, hang neatly, precisely, according to some kind of crackpot Dewey decimal system he devised, on tie racks in his closet. All his ties go with his suit. Albie’s suit, his only suit, is black, which can’t come as a surprise. Other than the fine weave of the fabric and that it was made in Italy and not ordered from the J. Crew catalog or L.L. Bean, it is an unremarkable suit, which is why he likes it. His shoes and socks are also black. The shirt he is wearing is white. The tie Bunny selects is heavy silk; heavy silk, yellow backdrop to multitudes of cornflower blue hieroglyphic-like birds. After tying his joyful tie into a perfect half-Windsor knot, Albie goes to the living room to read while he waits for Bunny to get ready.
Bunny decides on a dress from the late 1920s, ivory-colored velvet, mid-calf and cut on a bias. The fabric shimmers and shadows like the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons adorning the cuffs of the sleeves. Her shoes are black patent-leather T-straps with French heels. From her jewelry box, she gets her pearl-drop earrings, a gift from Albie for their tenth wedding anniversary, and a strand of pearls, another gift from Albie, but she can’t remember when or for what reason. The only makeup she wears is red lipstick, a matte maraschino-cherry red, and that’s that.
Fully absorbed with a book, something on paleontology, Albie is unaware that Bunny is there in the living room, until she says, “What do you think?” She turns, in place, full circle, like the pink ballerina in a music box.
For the first time in many weeks, Albie looks at his wife without feeling the need to close his eyes, and like a nine-year-old boy struck by love for the first time, he says, “You look like Snow White.”
“Really?” she asks. “I look okay?”
“Better than okay.” Albie gets up from the chair. “You look gorgeous.”
Although his tie needs no adjusting, Bunny nonetheless slides her hand over the heavy silk as if straightening it out, a decidedly wifely gesture, and then steps back to take in the full effect. “That is one handsome tie,” she says. “Where’d you get it?”
“My wife bought it for me,” Albie says, and Bunny says, “Your wife has good taste.” Then she asks, “Did you feed Jeffrey?”
After Albie says that of course he fed Jeffrey, there’s a pause that precedes the question. “You’re sure you want to go?”