I WAKE IN MY MARRIAGE BED. It’s deep night or early morning and I find a lamp on the bedside table and switch it on. A quilt is draped across my legs. My shoes have been removed. My mouth aches, and the lower half of my jaw. I turn my head and see an ugly rust-colored smudge where my cut lip’s been pressing against the white pillow while I’ve been sleeping.
Ruth, though not physically present, is all over this room: her needlepoint throw draped over a chair; her TV on a mahogany chest of drawers come down to her from her Aunt Marlene; her ivory bra hanging on the closet doorknob; her shoes with the heels worn down along the inside edge; her silver tray holding two small bottles of lavender water.
Eau-de-vie, I remember calling it once, till Ruth shook her head and with a sly grin said, “I think that’s the liqueur you’re talking about.”
We conceived Sam here. His bassinet stood in the corner by the window so he could watch the stars twinkling up in the blue-black sky if he felt the urge to see other worlds, which he often did. He slept and dreamed under an airplane mobile I put together from a kit.
After a while, I shuffle into the bathroom. Where, hours after the fact, the air still smells of Ruth’s bubble bath—like her, bracing rather than flowery. The scent of a morning walk along a Cape beach in summer, the tide out and the seaweed left to dry on the yellow sand, the sand yellow like my wife’s and son’s hair, on a Fourth of July weekend of the last perfect year, the three of us shot from behind in an endless, vanishing wide shot.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub, breathing it all in. Then, like the animal I am, I get up and stand for a minute pissing into the toilet. And go to the sink and stare into the bright clear mirror at my fifty-year-old face. The lower lip fat now with blood, a small blue star blooming in its corner.