The day had barely muttered grayly through the closed window, had barely whispered in the tunnel of her pink ear, had only rolled once to stretch its clouded back and try to dim the sun with ash-cover that would deny the hour, when she knew. She guessed by the still of the apartment, by the strength of her own breathing, by the lack of a certain damp warmth against the question mark of her curved body.
Caleb was gone.
She opened her eyes wide when the thought dinned, cracked through the swollen, tired tissue of brain, and ached to find signs. The closet was tightly closed, a shut mouth with secrets. She saw no scatter of clothing, no comfortable chaos of comb, brush, and hair-gel on the surface of the dresser. She closed her eyes again and felt a moan quiver through the tumult of her body.
She knew. He was gone.
There was the sound of early morning buses in the early morning gray. She opened her eyes and willed her body to rise, conscious of each limb making its way through her cloud of mind, conscious of touching the sides of the bed to hoist herself, conscious of the metal feel of bed-sides underneath her fingers. All too conscious. She wondered if there was wine life, if there was anything to dull the ache of awareness, the ache of knowing the inevitable.
Maybe – she thought – maybe he'd gone for newspapers, for coffee.
But that was a thought from a magazine, from a television sit-com. Caleb never read newspapers, nor did he drink coffee. Caleb was restless enough without stimulus from the outside, without the heavy jolt of caffeine. No, she was the one who did those things, who always tried to assimilate some of the machinery of the everyday world into their daily existence, which sometimes seemed too surreal to bear.
She made her way to the refrigerator. It was 7:00 a.m. She poured a glass of cheap Zinfandel from the bottle on the shelf. The apartment was in its usual state of tangled suspension. Some of Caleb's unfinished sculptures littered the floor, body parts poised, juxtaposed in ways that jolted the viewer, that seemed, somehow, as if they were cast from someone who had just leaped off a building or been thrown from a car.
They were the physical manifestations of Caleb's violent restlessness, kept tightly under sullen lock and key. Part of his attraction, she had to admit, part of his attraction. She remembered Caleb the first time she had seen him, leaning heavily on a table at his own art exhibit. He had a glass of wine in his hand, but he was not drinking. Occasionally, he would bring the glass to his full lips, always thrust forward in his prominent pout, but the red line of the wine never got any lower, and she had thought he was spitting it back out. And so he was. Later, she would discover that he never quite trusted himself, that alcohol encouraged that part of himself, that tight, loaded-cannon part, of which he was terrified. It was his dark child, the one he kept firmly hidden in the cloak of his skin. His little Heathcliff, she thought now, ruefully. And it was this part of him, she knew, that would, one day, one hour, compel him to leave. Not too close, she had thought, I won't get too close and then he won't have an excuse to leave. I will be good, I will be quiet, I will not pry. I will let him be.
Now, she saw it did not matter. Would he return for the sculpture? Presumably, he still had the key. Yes, she thought, he would return, but when he could be sure she was not home. She knew, unequivocally, that she would not see him again.
She drained the wine glass and tried to decide how she felt. There was no furniture in the apartment, just mobiles of body parts turning softly in the great city breeze. She missed him already, missed him horribly, could feel the hole his absence would tear into her skin and into her body. She tried to think of what she would miss, tried to give it substance, so that she could give herself a proper form of grieving, a proper burial. Yet, she noticed a certain tension had lifted from her skin, the tension she had felt since she and Caleb had moved in together, the tension that, when she left herself think about it, made her body, skin, limbs, feel like the limbs of Caleb's statues, of his mobiles, the ones that were, somehow, out of joint, or kept in check with thin, strong fish wire.
She thought about this, and glanced at the drained glass. Well, she thought leave it to a glass of cheap white Zin at 7:00 a.m.
Still, she knew that was not it. Then she laughed. She suddenly thought of Caleb in his black trench coat, in his sneakers, in his wire rims and long hair.
He's the one
, she thought,
