He slipped out of his galoshes and his loafers. In stocking feet Eckwright moved through his home: past the living room’s velveteen sofa and overstuffed bookcases, the books stacked two-deep, some jutting over the lips of shelves; past the kitchen, where the debris of his life—empty envelopes, discarded magazines, damp tea bags, empty pill bottles—lay in paper grocery sacks, waiting to be taken out on trash day. He made his way into his study, where he realized he was still wearing his winter coat. Eckwright carefully removed it, brushed the few flakes of snow off the shoulders, and set it on the back of his chair.
From under the desk he took out his portfolio and opened it to his current project: narrating Lynn back into his life. First, as with any character, he’d described her physical appearance: her frizzy hair that rose as if with yeast when it was humid; her symmetrical, angular body; the soft, dark fuzz on her upper thighs, where she never shaved. Then her mannerisms: the way she entered every room slowly, cautiously, as if stepping into a hot bath, ever fearful of intruding on her husband at work. Lynn had never interrupted him by being too loud, however; Eckwright was deaf when he wrote, and his present loss of hearing seemed a fulfillment of years spent ignoring the outside world. There was, though, something naturally distracting about Lynn—perhaps, even, it was precisely her silence, or her efforts at silence—something alluring and innocent and irresistible that Eckwright detested for his inability to disregard it: she enlivened his unwilling senses. Tentativeness pervaded her every action; she even dressed slowly. To watch her clothe herself (as Eckwright often had) was to witness an act of creation, an emergence of Lynn from Lynn. It was a long process of trial and error. First one outfit, then another, and another. She’d model for the mirror, checking how a dress might fall from her collarbones or from her hips, smiling at her own figure, only to disrobe again a moment later. If the heel of a sock were fraying just a little, the entire ensemble would have to be reconsidered. Many times he’d woken in the morning to find Lynn standing confused and naked at the foot of their bed, pale as a banana, a pile of her clothes on the floor like the peel of an exotic, but somehow familiar, fruit. (Later, in the last decade of their marriage, she would dress Eckwright with the same slowness, selecting for him his suits, his coats, his shoes and socks, his pajamas. Wordlessly Eckwright would stand in the middle of their floor, lift one leg, then the other, while Lynn slid on his pants. He always felt, as she fussed with his buttons and fastened his clasps, that Lynn was sculpting him. It wasn’t the fabric itself, but her touch on it—tucking in shirt-ends, turning out cuffs, tightening laces —that made his skin tingle lightly, affirmed of its existence.) Eckwright could no longer remember any of this; he was reminded only when re-reading and editing what he’d written.
Early on he’d realized he could not simply turn his memories into words, but must irrevocably exchange one for the other. His mind was the only place Lynn existed, and he had to extract her from it whole. Faintly, innately, with only his artist’s impulse, Eckwright understood that if he withheld any remnant of her, her resurrection would be incomplete. And so, for the last six months, it was with reluctant persistence that he’d continued his work. He’d even disposed of her possessions, packed her clothes and jewelry and pictures in cardboard boxes and kept them in the basement.
A red pencil in his hand, he flipped open his manuscript to find Lynn in a thermal sweatsuit and the cooking apron she wore when she was gardening. Judging from the excess of gray in her hair she must have already been sixty, but her face seemed younger than it had been in reality, her breasts perkier, enlivened by the effect of Eckwright’s affection on his memory. It was a morning in fall, and the air contained an incongruous mixture of sun and cold; the first frosts had already come—the leaves on the ground were wet and shiny—and Lynn, perhaps a week too late, was planting tulip bulbs for spring. He’d watched her from the window of his office, which looked out on their garden. (“Decent detail,” Eckwright wrote in the margin.) The topsoil was frozen, and the muscles in Lynn’s forearms tensed and flexed as she dug through it with her trowel, steam rising from the ground when she reached the lower, insulated depths of earth. Kneeling on her green foam pad, she seemed in a posture of mourning, as if unaware that the bulbs she was burying would soon reemerge above the surface. (“A bit overdone, maybe” he scribbled.) And then Eckwright saw something strange: a circular object glistened in her palm. It could have been a coin or a small pendant, though it could also have been something as innocent as a frosted-over dandelion head. Whatever it was, she seemed to be hiding it from him. He only glimpsed it when Lynn’s hand had momentarily opened to take a bulb from the wax paper bag. She’d then quickly placed the flower, along with the unknown item, into the ground. (“What’s the payoff?” he wrote in red.)
For the last three nights he’d felt the anticipation that preceded the conclusion to all his work: giddiness and self-doubt, a desire to burn his pages. Presently he could recall only the scenes of routine, the tasks Lynn had performed daily. Before, he’d regarded these memories as trivial and unnecessary, but tonight he was grateful for them. There she was at the sink, pre-rinsing plates before putting them in the dishwasher. There she was in the basement, separating dark clothes from whites. There she was on a Sunday, watering the hibiscus and the orchids in the sunroom. Her routines had always been her gravity. Watching her had been his.
Eckwright wrote on.
When Lynn’s menstrual cycle came upon her she knew it was time to feed the sunroom plants. The flowers all began to die after she reached menopause. (Much later, he’d found dried petals, pressed between pages of his books.) Again and again he envisioned her washing the dishes, first in a housedress, then in a sweat suit, once in an evening gown, her motions and her posture remaining the same. There were subtler differences, too. The way she wore her hair. Whether or not she had on dish gloves (by the end of her life her hands were immune to scalding). The faint ammonia smell she exuded after she got sick. Eckwright was surprised to remember these details, and sad to abandon them so quickly through his pen.
Finally the last dish had been soaped and rinsed and set in the machine. Lynn vanished. The smell of dish soap, though, remained in his memory, and the dishwasher still moaned, and beads of water evaporated from the plates in the drying rack.
Eckwright opened his eyes, extinguishing the scene. The pulsing he’d felt in his throat at the bookstore returned, resonating now so his entire body was synchronized with it. Her disappearance from his mind seemed sudden, though he knew the erosion had been slow. A panic overtook him. Frantically he tried to remember something, but could not. His mind raced and he recalled French lessons from his youth, dinners with his grandparents, scenes from books he’d read: memories whose narration would have no consequence.