Forty Days and Nights: Love Stories. 11. Her, Now

He had thought she was so beautiful. He had never seen anyone so beautiful and it made him afraid. He was still afraid when they had been married for a long time, such a long time that he spoke of her beauty with detachment, as a thing seen from far off and not connected to himself. Her beauty was a puzzle, a bewilderment to him and a burden to her. She carried it as a task beyond her, too big for her, staggered under it, dropped it awkwardly into conversations, hit people and the edges of doorways with it as she made her way through church services and school events, parties and family dinners. In the end, for him her beauty was a wound he carried that never healed and for her, after she had denied being a beauty for so long and so well, it became the one place in her life she finally got her way, finally got what she insisted had always been the case and lost her beauty as though it had never been.

But in the beginning she was so lovely he was undone by her, unable not to try, not to risk, not to reach out. He staked everything he had, took all he was and set it out before her, nakedly, not even trying at all to pretend there might be more where that came from, he might have a trick or two up his sleeve, that whatever she had seen so far she hadn't seen nothin' yet. He set all himself in front of her and waited for her to take it or to leave it and he waited quite a while, because he was like that and so, it turned out, was she. She let him wait and even after years of married days, he was still waiting.

Her beauty was deep to him; he wanted to believe it was deep and alive like the ocean on the planet and essential to her soul, as rich and thick on the inside of her as it was on her outside. She's lovely, people said admiringly, especially when they saw her with him in a picture, and he had to agree. She was lovely, especially when she stood by him for a picture to be taken. She turned to him then, curved to him then, smiled by him then and if you only saw them in pictures they made a picture to sigh for, to reach for, to believe a man might risk his whole self on. After the picture she straightened and turned away, her smile gone, vanished like a flame can vanish. Light, heat, life, nothing. And he had seen her arrested as she stepped away from him, stopped cold when the person with the camera said, oh, wait, that one wasn't good, let me get another, and he had seen her whip around to him, smile warm and delightful, arms reaching around him, her face tucked right up by his, turning the both of them to the reflective eye of the camera. Flash. Click. Gone. What a lovely picture.

He wasn't the sort of man, when first he saw her or later or ever, who could look at such color and texture and not see it running right through her, touching every part and piece of her, even if what he was seeing was a story he was building as he went along. He wasn't, then, at the beginning or ever in his life, a man to wrap himself in a surface and call that living. He poured all his fresh, untried, hopeful ideals about people, about life, about everything, into her, gave her beauty direction and purpose and narrative and she adored the way he saw her and feared it and loathed it and hated him for not being able to make her as real as he thought she was. She held him fiercely to that idea of her he had created between the two of them before he even knew her, before he knew anything, held him by a short and cruel rope that twisted more tightly about the two of them with every passing day of married life. She never had been and never became the woman he had held up for the two of them to believe in and admire, she never became anything at all, and she never forgave him for that. Never. She threw it at him every day, every night, in every fight, and that bewildered him as much as anything about her ever had.

There were photographs of the two of them all over the walls of their house, and she shuffled them, adjusted them, rearranged them often, often. He was always coming upon his own smiling face in some unexpected place, his own face telling him what it told all the people who looked at their marriage from the outside. Look, his face said to him, look at this happy couple. Look at all the love, look at that beautiful woman. It was what he said to her when she screamed and stormed, the picture of them he held up to her when she ranted and threw both of them out of the house, out of her life, out of the frame. Look, he said, look at the love. Look at all the love. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about that, and the face she gave him when they were alone, red and swollen and tear streaked, mouth set in permanent and impotent rage, silly words streaming out for hours, why can't you when will you you always if you would just you are so, that face was so beautiful he just stood back and looked at it. Stood back quite a ways, further and further as years of married days went by. Even from there he could see that she was a beautiful woman. Such a beautiful woman.

When finally he stood so far off that he could no longer hear words coming out of the mouth that smiled so easily and readily for the camera and never kissed his own mouth with any trace of life in the lips, when he finally stood right out of the frame, he carried within him still the boy he had been when first he saw her and what he had supposed to be the beauty of her soul had stopped his heart and started it again, beating now in a rhythm he had assumed was a dance for two, the dance of his life. He remembered the story of the two of them he had told himself and he gasped at the gut punch of never having believed it, not at all, not even when in the beginning she had been so beautiful he had simply been unable to reconcile that beauty he could touch with that absence in her heart he could feel. He had made up a story to explain her, to justify her in the world as he had understood it then. He had fallen in love at first sight with a story he had made up on the spot and he had married his own story and he knew that if he had it to do all over again he would do it all over again. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and shook his head. Shook it again and tried to straighten under the dead weight of all he had lost, dragging a killing burden of things he never had. What a waste, what a waste, the both of them. She had been so beautiful. So achingly, breakingly beautiful, and look at her now. Just look at her now. Just look.