Stone Mattress Read Free Page B

floor and the windowthey’d punched through, and the air conditioning and the ceiling fan, the attic was small and stuffy, as the top floors of these old brick Victorians are. So after a while – after the boys were in high school – Alphinland had migrated to the kitchen table, where it unscrolled for several years on an electric typewriter – once considered the height of innovation, now obsolete. The computer was its next location, and not without its hazards – things could disappear from it in an infuriating manner – but they’ve improved the computers over time and she’s become used to hers now. She moved it into Ewan’s study after he was no longer in there in visible form.
    She doesn’t say “after his death,” even to herself. She doesn’t use the D-word about him at all. He might overhear it and be hurt or offended, or perhaps confused, or even angry. It’s one of her not-fully-formulated beliefs that Ewan doesn’t realize that he’s dead.
    She sits at Ewan’s desk, swathed in Ewan’s black plush bathrobe. Black plush bathrobes for men were cutting edge, when? The ’90s? She’d bought this bathrobe herself, as a Christmas present. Ewan always resisted her attempts to make him cutting edge, not that those attempts had lasted much beyond the bathrobe; she’d run out of interest in how he looked to others.
    She wears this bathrobe not for heat but for comfort: it makes her feel that Ewan might still be in the house physically, just around the corner. She hasn’t washed it since he died; she doesn’t want it to smell of laundry detergent instead of Ewan.
    Oh Ewan
, she thinks.
We had such good times! All gone now. Why so fast?
She wipes her eyes on the black plush sleeve.
    “Pull yourself together,” says Ewan. He never likes it when she sniffles.
    “Right,” she says. She squares her shoulders, adjusts the cushion on Ewan’s ergonomic desk chair, turns the computer on.

    The screensaver comes up: it’s a gateway, drawn for her by Ewan, who was a practising architect before he took up the more dependable job of university teaching, though what he taught was not called “Architecture,” it was called “Theory of Constructed Space” and “Human Landscape Creation” and “The Contained Body.” He’d remained very good at drawing, and he’d found an outlet for it in making funny pictures for the children and then the grandchildren. He’d drawn the screensaver for her as a gift, and to show that he took this thing of hers – this thing that was, let’s face it, somewhat embarrassing to him in the more abstract intellectual circles to which he belonged – to show that he took her thing seriously. Or that he took her seriously, both of which she’d had reason to doubt from time to time. Also that he’d pardoned her for Alphinland, for her neglect of him because of it. The way she’d look at him without seeing him.
    One of her own ideas is that the screensaver was a repentance gift, making it up to her for something he wouldn’t admit he’d done. That period of emotional absence during which Ewan must have been otherwise occupied – if not physically, then emotionally – with another woman. With another face, another body, another voice, another scent. A wardrobe not hers, with its alien belts and buttons and zippers. Who was that woman? She’d suspect, then be wrong. The shadowy presence laughed at her softly from the sleepless darkness of 3 a.m., then slid away. She couldn’t pin anything down.
    All that time she’d felt like an inconvenient block of wood. She’d felt boring, and only half-alive. She’d felt numb.
    She’d never pushed him about that interlude, never confronted him. The subject was like the D-word: it was there, it loomed over them like a huge advertising blimp, but to mention it would have been like breaking a spell. It would havebeen terminal.
Ewan, are you seeing someone else? Pull yourself together. Use your common sense. Why would I need to do