Fiction.

Letters

(Written for my Letter as Literature class, the assignment was to create an epistolary situation from the text italicized.) 

It has been six months since she disappeared. Richard’s trembling hands sets back down the fat, heart shaped perfume bottle on the corner of the bathroom counter, which smells faintly of pink lipped flowers and soft silk slips, and holds his breath—for a minute, then two, then releases. It is time, he tells himself. He peers at himself momentarily, his weary dark eyes, his clumsy stubble, his too soft, too wide face. He looks away.

He goes to her room, the small alcove she claimed to be her room anyway, behind the ivory Japanese dividers. Promise it’s mine? She had asked, a little breathless, a little Marilyn, and he had said, of course, of course. She kissed him quickly, on tiptoes. She was so small! He thinks of her head of antique gold curls, her high pitched, anxious laugh, bony wrists and bony shoulders. He imagines her in the room, sitting on the high backed chair with her legs folded beneath her. He asked her what she did here, all that time alone, and she had looked at him with unfocused eyes and said oh, just, nothing.

Maybe today he gets answers. He slides out the chair and sits down. The desk is mostly empty, and looks swept clean in a hurry. He notices a loose button, picks it up and sets it back down. There are her stacks of books, a tottering tower rising from the floor, there are the drawers, and there are the dried, dead flowers in the thin glass vase. Perhaps she left because he hadn’t bought her enough flowers.

But she knew that when she married him there would be few occasions for flowers. She was so beautiful on their wedding day, smiling with that dreamy light in her eyes like he had seen few times since. He pulls open the top drawer, a deep drawer, and rummages through a scattered pile of postcards with watercolor paintings, black and white photographs of exotic cityscapes, simple pretty illustrations, all blank. Then his hand meets something, a thick stack of cold, smooth paper.

He sets it in the center of the desk, and the first word that Richard reads, even before he has torn off the blue silk ribbons, strikes him numb for a moment…with wide open eyes he looks around to see if everything in the room is still the same, and then he looks up at the ceiling, and then again at the letters that are now lying silent in front of him and yet in the next minute will tell him everything that the first word intimidated.

To My Darling Aimee, the topmost envelope reads, in a lavish script that looks like it comes from the 18th century, in a rich, velvety teal ink. Richard recognizes the handwriting—of course, it is unmistakable, it is remarkable. He had remarked on it years and years ago, at the reading his wife had insisted on attending for her birthday, from the poet, with his bitten lips and muddled green eyes, his long, thin finger tips that held on to a fancy fountain pen as he wrote in her copy of the book, all the best, Marcel. She had beamed at him, her cheeks powdered carnation pink. That night she insisted on reading aloud, before bed, to him, verses that she nearly sang, and he had been so tired and bored but it was her birthday and so he faked a smile and tried to listen. It was so many loose, disconnected words, images that couldn’t take hold in his mind. But she was so happy.

Shortly after she asked for her room. Was that when it began? He pushes the ribbon aside and takes out the first letter. That sickeningly bright white paper, that same overwrought script, a whole page. He scans it, the words hard to make out, caught up in all those swoops and curls. It is undoubtedly the poet. He feels a pang of something—disgust, regret, resignation? He shifts through the rest of the pile. These meticulous pressed envelopes, nearly a different ink color each time, always addressed to his darling Aimee, as if she never existed as anything else, certain not as anyone’s Mrs.

Not long after the room she got the job, at the flower shop, she said, and that was when she began to bring home the fresh bouquets nearly every evening, roses and tulips and bell shaped flowers he didn’t know the name for, in vibrant violets or blushing pinks, sinister red and quivering yellows. She always kept a few in her room but left the rest on the kitchen counter, and it took him a while to get used to them, sometimes the bright colors startled him when he came home, and sometimes they were so heavily scented he wondered if they were especially sprayed with perfume, so much so that they distracted him and he spilled beer on the same counter, panicked wiping with a coarse paper towel.

The house was bewitched by something, then. Even he in all his blindness had sensed that. But mostly Richard was happy that she found something she loved, that she kept her nervous hands busy, that she smiled at him when she came home. He felt that he disappointed her.

Almost mechanically, he opens another letter. His eyes linger on odd phrases. Love letters, sappy, unapologetic love letters. But Aimee had always had a soft spot for romance. It was the only reason she agreed to a date with him way back when, she told him once, because his dumb persistence was so charming, like a little boy blindly in love, she couldn’t refuse. And then it had been his naivety, his embarrassment that charmed her. It was the story she told anyway, to friends when they asked. She would have never acknowledged the truth, that she wasn’t used to being pursued at all, that she was always passed over for her prettier friends, those tall, slender creatures with the watery big eyes and soft skin. He had been smitten because he thought she was different. Smart.

And here in front of him was the painful evidence of the opposite. She never gave up her hopes for a fairy tale romance, never stopped dreaming of her princess life. No, she could have never worked in a flower shop, with those clumsy, frightened hands, she would have hurt the delicate petals and jammed stems too close. He starts to crumple the letter in his hands, but the paper is surprisingly resistant, and when he finally clenches the glaring white sheet in his fists it feels bigger, somehow, heavier. He throws the sheet and it stumbles on the wood floor.

Years ago, he had tried. To write her a letter, a love letter. He did it with uneven, messy handwriting on the printer paper from work, with a black ball point pen. His writing looked childish, big and angular and slanting downwards. When he tried to correct it the page looked even worse. He told himself that she wouldn’t care, that it was what he said that counted. He had looked up love quotes and sweet things to say. But he couldn’t bring himself to call her darling. He wrote Dear Aimee and signed it Your Truly, Richard. It was going to accompany their anniversary, which was dinner reservations at an expensive French place with a name he couldn’t pronounce. He handed it to her across the table as they waited for dessert. She had drunken her glass of white wine and seemed happy. Oh, Richard, she had said. She read it quickly and smiled at him. You’re so nice. Said in the same tone one might compliment a pet. He was happy.

He remembers that a few days later she had taken it out of her bag and left it on the coffee table, and when he saw it he thought it must have been a mistake. He brought it to her and she barely looked at him and said you sweet thing, I’ll take care of it later, just leave it. He did, and it stayed there on the coffee table. Water stains came on top of it, then magazines, newspapers, bills. One he came home and the table was empty, glossy with cleaner waiting to dry.

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #lit #long reads
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