Nearly the Same Thing

IN THE OFFICE, Frank shows me his wife, or he shows me pictures of his wife, which is nearly the same thing.

He says he never developed most of his photos, in case they turned out different to what he remembered, so they lay around the house like unposted letters until he rooted them out, brought them to the chemist and handed them over, with a smile as faded and hopeful as the chemicals, after all these years.

‘And look at this!’ he says, as if to show that, statistically speaking, he had always loved his wife, because most of them are of her—as if his eye always knew what his heart could not tell. They are not the usual conjugal snaps. She is not standing in front of the view with her hand on her hip and the sun in her eyes. Frank is good all right. His wife is often moving and the colours are blurred. He snaps her like someone you pass on the street. Very rarely, she has a sense of him there in the corner of her eye, but more often she is complete, private and uncomposed.

He tried to show them to her, but she shouted at him. At first he thought she was afraid of how she looked, or what she had lost. Then she slipped a cool word in. She said ‘You didn’t find the ones in the glove compartment, did you?’ and Frank realised what it had cost her to leave the rolls of film as they were. She thought there was another woman in there, whom she did not know and did not want to see, a woman she could study for signs of her own mysterious lack. She thought that he had left them lying around as a temptation, as a dare—‘You can end it anytime. Just look in here.’

In the drawer on her side of the bed, in among the mechanics of sex, was a casing with the celluloid pulled right out, a curl of plastic, with thirty-six unconnected, connected moments that he had lost, whitening in the light.