A Pot over a Very Low Heat

“I am not a bad person, I promise you,” the husband said. “But what would you do if you were me?”

“If I were you?” the wife answered—“I’d never have had such a good time with Della Lou.”

Regardless, by that time, the wife had been perpetually thinking about Della Lou.

 

These days, more typically, her mind is elsewhere paying homage to her seasoned husband or to their loot—to the silver vessels, the Meissen—the prized pair of porcelain magpies, with tongues out, who turn on their perches.

Her rare brass table clock is currently in somebody else’s private collection and now the husband is too. He is living with Della Lou because he could not stop the story of his life from flopping around or from twisting, for which one of us can? Exactly.

Guests come through the wife’s home, not always respectful of her habit of orderliness, and they often opine—You’ve got quite another country here!—while she is liable to be emptying a bowl into a pot over a very low heat.

And left to her own devices, she does host creditable house parties and there’s her new wall–to-wall French gray wool carpeting covering many of the floors, and on her face, a growing display of maculation. These are the free-form brown marks that attest to her long service.

She often conjures her husband who is stiff looking—backlit by her mind’s proprietary light—not aged and dedicated to her.

 

“You’ll be staying,” the woman tells her guest, who is giddy when the doorbell rings, and the telephone, and a buzzer for a timer—all in synchrony.

Some of us are subtly drawn out by these elementary wake-up calls that clang.

Some of us have proper brisk responses.

What has been solicited, in this particular case, are the grinning faces of a set of formally attired antique women with crimson traces on their lips, pinked fingertips. They are quite perfect with deeper color in the folds of their clothing.