Short Story: The Healing Process

Short Story: The Healing Process

My wife spends many hours by herself. We call it the healing process. Hour after hour she’ll sit, clutched by the pine rocker, moving back and forth. By habit I ask if she’s bored, and she smiles in response. Her smile has changed over time, my question has not.

The first time I asked her, we had only been married six weeks; her pain still fresh. We’d spend hour after hour, one curled against the other, enjoying the exchange of warmth, and sensing the other one slipping into sleep for a few minutes or, occasionally, hours. Usually it was my wife who slept; fitfully for the most part, eyelids flickering, the orbs beneath the delicate coverings roaming to left and right.

‘You were dreaming,’ I told her, upon awakening.

She smiled weakly.

‘What of?’ I demanded, to which she whispered, ‘The usual.’

‘Don’t you get bored?’ I enquired.

She didn’t reply. She struggled to her feet, rubbing a calf that must have numbed during sleep, and left the room. Without closing the door to the bathroom, she peed.

‘It’s different,’ she told me, settling back into my side and appending ‘every time’ a couple of seconds later.

It’s something I continue to find endearing, her postponing the delivery of a word or phrase, so altering the dynamic of what she’s saying; or rather, what I thought she was saying. Like when I asked her to marry me. The two of us were chilled to the bone as we bobbed upon the surface of the boating lake in a peeling punt, the grey wind dragging her hair to one side. ‘You look like your brother,’ she’d told me. ‘With a hat on, that is,’ she added, kneeling in the bottom of the boat and pulling the woollen band over my ear lobes. She replaced her backside on the shelf-seat and looked across the lake to the shore. The teenage boy on duty at the boat house had been kneeling, threading a chain through the snout-rings screwed to the prow of each craft, and now stood up, waving an arm in our direction. ‘Time’s up,’ she said, blowing into her gloved hands.

‘Will you marry me?’ I enquired, turning the boat around with an oar. ‘This is so difficult,’ she complained as I scooped both paddles into the water. The teenager had been helping her back onto dry land when she finally added, ‘But yes.’

‘Always different,’ she confirmed.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Just so,’ she smiled apologetically.

‘Just so,’ I echoed, drawing her closer.

•

‘How do you justify it?’ she’d demanded.

‘I can’t,’ I admitted.

‘What?’ she coughed, and expecting more from her subject repeated her previous question.

‘I’ve nothing to justify,’ I restated. ‘If people are prepared to dedicate time and money to what I do, irrespective of it’s worth – be that artistic, societal or intellectual - where’s the need for me to do so?’

‘Which means?’ The faintest of smiles tugged at a corner of her mouth.

‘You’ve got eyes,’ I informed her. ‘What do you see?’

For the most part white. White walls, white ceiling, white floor, white light; no windows, just fluorescence to intensify the whiteness. Apart from, that is, the canvases that hung from the walls at irregular intervals; again white, but different. Deft shadows, cast by a canvas edge, bruised narrow avenues of white brickwork; while the hanging enclosures of oil paint offered the subtlest of grey textures, as though gazing down at tracts of ploughed perma-frost from two-hundred feet.

‘Nothing to suggest I’m not wasting my time,’ she commented, studying the men and women who shuffled from canvas to canvas or stood in tight huddles, sipping champagne from narrow flutes, speaking and nodding when appropriate.

‘Exactly how I feel,’ I admitted, exchanging my empty glass for a fresh one handed me by a waitress.

I swallowed the sparkling wine, and took her by an elbow.

‘Come with me,’ I told her, manoeuvring my arm so it rested across her shoulders. ‘I want to show you something.’

We made our way past and through the groups of people who were there to appraise and appreciate my latest offering to the world; a cynical collection entitled The White Issue. Reviews that appeared in the press over the following days and weeks echoed the comments that encouraged our leaving The Crucible Gallery His most challenging work to date... Access of appreciation permitted only to those willing to embrace the artist’s imagination... An uncompromising demonstration of artistic and intellectual prowess... Work combining anger and playful arrogance in a manner unseen for years. They all missed the point, or weren’t prepared to articulate their contempt. Except one person the slender, stylishly dressed woman who suffered the compliments breathed in our faces as we exited The Crucible.

She’d been dispatched by the editor of a respected publication to report back on the latest to emerge from my mind. For the past six years I’d been the toast of the town, and not just the one where I lived. You name a town, I was the toast of it Paris, New York, Sydney, Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, London. They all wanted a part of me; or rather, part of what I produced. Galleries in Paris collectively paid half a million for my Stratified and Rusting Man pieces; New York, one-and-a-half for the six canvases that comprised Breakfast at Dawn; Barcelona, far too much for the Longing for... sculptures; whilst the leader of a once Communist state paid a ludicrous amount for my Silence and Stones collection, only for it to be destroyed when the wave of democratic reform breached the defences of the Presidential Palace. Despite the fifty-percent my agent creamed off every sale, I was wealthy. Far wealthier than my then abode and studio, located in the run-down dock area, suggested.

Taxis were never keen to journey to my front door because of the area, but the promise of a large bill persuaded the driver to deliver us where I desired. Going by the number of times his eyes studied her in the rear-view mirror, it was probably also because my companion was the best looking fare he’d picked up that day.

‘Keep your eyes on the road in future,’ she advised as I handed him the promised bill.

‘Sure thing,’ the driver grinned, snatching the note from my fingers. ‘Go catch your fish, friend,’ he added, nodding to where she stood on the sidewalk, waiting.

‘Are you sure I can’t get you something else to drink?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, sipping at the mug of hot chocolate. She continued flicking through a pile of sketches on a table top before looking my way and adding, ‘Thank you. This is fine.’

‘Good,’ I smiled.

‘So where is it?’ she enquired with a grin, resting her behind on the sketches.

‘What?’ I countered.

‘You wanted to show me something?’ she suggested, strolling across the room and picking up a canvas that leaned against the wall, its subject concealed. She glanced at the canvas, grunted and returned it to the wall. ‘Interesting,’ she commented. She turned to me and waited.

The silence may have continued indefinitely, but I said, ‘This way.’

She followed me from the room.

‘This is what it’s all been about,’ I explained, her heels echoing as we hurried along the bare-boarded corridor. ‘The last three years. Maybe more.’ I stopped short and she collided with my back. I turned to face her. ‘What it’s always been about, I suppose.’

I continued along the corridor that turned left and right. Canvases narrowed the space through which we walked. Sculptures, complete or not and in varying states of ruin, occupied right-angles, comforted by thick quilts of dust. Books and catalogues, stacked in vulnerable Pisas or upon sagging shelves, reached to the ceiling. And behind door after door, rooms I hadn’t entered for months lay sleeping.

‘No one knows,’ I called over my shoulder, as she struggled to keep pace. ‘Not even my agent. It’s for me. Something that’s always been part of me. It made me begin, and will probably make me...’

I stopped before the door and waited for her to join me. We were both breathing heavily.

Thrusting a hand into my trouser pocket, I extracted the tarnished key, slipped it into the lock, and turned. The door sprung open away from me, revealing a dark, wooden-floored room. I flicked the light switch and pressed my back to the corridor wall, gesturing for her to enter.

She stepped tentatively through the frame before taking half a dozen paces to the centre of the room. She looked to left and right, to ceiling and floor, then behind; the wall upon which the canvases were hung. She gasped audibly and brought a hand to her throat. Her eyes divorced themselves from the canvas, seeking mine.

‘It’s...’ she raised her hand to her lips, covering her mouth. ‘It’s...’ she looked to the canvas again, lowering the hand to reveal a smile; then, quickly raised it to wipe the tears that had welled in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she whispered.

Later that night, much later, when the sun was an hour from emerging in the east, we made love; but that’s not something I’m going to describe.

‘What was last night about?’ she asked, once we’d awoken. We sat opposite the other at what passed for a kitchen table - a door nailed to four uprights of timber - that days papers open at the review sections. The compliments were continuing in print.

‘It was an attempt,’ I began, ‘to engender a constructive debate amongst critics and public alike in to the emotions and energies expended in creating...’I couldn’t help pausing.

She had gone to the window, and now peered down to the street. Looking to me briefly she said, ‘I meant...’ but shook her head tiredly. ‘About us,’ she eventually added.

‘I thought you meant...’ I laughed, stumbling.

She smiled. ‘The White Issue?’ she enquired. ‘Perhaps I did.’

I joined her at the window. ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, do you?’ I asked.

Again, she smiled and placed her brow against the pane. ‘It’s so difficult,’ she said sadly. ‘But no.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.

‘You will,’ she said.

•

For the next three years I learnt to understand; or rather, we both did. For the most part in private, amongst the canvases, constructions and chaos of my home; and occasionally in public, when the situation permitted. This wasn’t our choice; but if we wished our relationship to exist it had to occur, for the most part, behind closed doors. We were balanced upon the arms of scales at the mercy of counter-weights progress and tradition; and our home town appeared damned if it was prepared to reconcile the inevitability of progress with the comfort of tradition.

During those three years we spent two nights together; but we shared afternoons; and to this day they remain periods of intense intimacy a time for silent enjoyment of the other’s physical and spiritual companionship. Nights proved the greatest hardship.

I found it easier to bear than she; I had already become used to how people perceived me a vogue that would fall from favour and be forgotten. Until that decline I was good for column inches and conversation; but the fall couldn’t come quickly enough for most. They were tired of having to treat me as their own to compliment, flatter and entertain. It made them uncomfortable, accepting me into their fold. They knew, as well as I, that I didn’t belong. But she did.

Which is why I failed to consider the longevity of our relationship until she arrived one lunch time and presented me with a bottle of champagne.

‘To celebrate,’ she announced, gliding across the floor whilst unbuttoning her dress-front.

‘The sale?’ I suggested. The previous evening my agent had phoned me with news that a major London gallery had purchased my canvases entitled 17 and 17A (the pair I had revealed to her on the night of our first meeting) for a ridiculous sum of money.

‘Yes,’ she replied, permitting me to slip the material from her shoulders. ‘But also our anniversary.’

‘What anniversary?’ I demanded, as she unhooked her brassiere and dropped it at her feet.

She took my hands in her own and placed one on each of her breasts. ‘Two years,’ she told me.

I wasn’t with her when she informed her family of her intention; during the habitual Sunday lunch, when parents, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews would spread comfortably around the mahogany table. She told them while dessert was being served, a course she didn’t taste; and if any one did was no doubt soured.

She arrived at my front door, drunk, her eyes bloodied by tears and alcohol, and desperate. Demanding that I convince her she had done the right thing, she drank on until she passed out, sometime after dusk. Three weeks later, without sound or sign from her family, we married. Two weeks after this we moved from town, never to return.

Nine years after the healing process began her parents called. She listened to what the caller said before putting down the receiver. Seconds later the phone rang again and she picked it up.

‘It’s been too long,’ she said, and ended the call. Then, with a look of weariness, she curled herself into the pine rocker and closed her eyes. 'It’s been too long,’ she repeated later that evening. She’d demanded we make love before falling asleep, then told me of her parents call. ‘You can’t willingly erase someone from your life for that period of time and imagine there’s a means of re-engaging. It’s just not possible. Wounds heal. I feel nothing towards them. Am I being unfair?’ she demanded.

Earlier this year she answered the phone, listened to what the caller said, and then cried with a passion I hadn’t witnessed before. Then, without a word she left the house and returned just before midnight, with an elderly man and woman. The man was holding a small suitcase; the woman, her eyes watering, a crumpled paper napkin in her right hand.

They were her parents, and had called from a motel thirty miles away. Now, they were guests in our home, thirteen years after they banished my wife from what had then been hers.

‘I’m sorry,’ her mother said, touching the end of her nose with the napkin. ‘We’re sorry,’ she corrected.

I stepped forward and held out my right hand to her father. He offered his own, but I took the suitcase from his left hand and carried it upstairs.

•

My wife spends many hours by herself. We call it the healing process. Hour after hour she’ll sit, clutched by the pine rocker, moving back-and-forth. By habit I ask if she’s bored, and she smiles in response. Her smile has changed over time, my question has not.

She looks out over the land surrounding our home, the deciduous woodland, the arable acreage, the distant settlements that only come to life at this time of year when inhabitants turn on house-lights. I know her eye seeks only the vehicle that will approach along the sinuous track, from the road to our driveway. She awaits her parents with a child-like excitement, barely able to keep herself from standing with her nose to the windowpane, misting the glass with her breath, imagining her being in that position will bring their arrival that instant closer.

Only now is my wife healing; despite her claim to the contrary all those nights ago when we lay in bed, having made love. It is a process only her parents could initiate, irrespective of my desire for it to be otherwise, and I am grateful for it having begun.

I believed that my wife’s healing process would be something of which I would remain ignorant; that it would be internal and unseen; something fiercely personal. I was wrong. Whilst one process occurs in her mind, another is at work upon her body invigorating her flesh, energising her poise, sensualising the blood flowing through her veins.

I dwell upon this evidence as I approach the front door to the house, a little girl clinging to each of my hands the little girls who have grown to love their grandparents with such intensity after meeting them on half a dozen occasions. This morning they were awake at dawn, demanding to know when Nanna and Grandpa would arrive. By three o’clock, denied the opportunity to concentrate by their relentless sense of anticipation, I ordered my daughters to protect themselves against the elements before leading them across plough and coarse grass, hopeful of inducing lethargy within their small limbs. Still I fail to appreciate the reserves of energy six-year olds possess.

Throwing their coats and scarves in my direction, and leaving their muddied boots on the veranda, my daughters race each other to reach where my wife sits. As seems only appropriate for twins, they arrive simultaneously, throwing themselves at her feet before hugging a leg each. Then, having awaited their mother’s permission, they clamber into her lap, resting their chilled faces against her warm cheeks.

As I climb the stairs a car horn sounds from out front, and the girls scream with excitement. Before the tyres have come to a standstill the front door is open, and three pairs of shoeless feet are running out to meet their guests. In a few minutes I will join them in the kitchen, my daughters shared between grandparents, my wife beginning the preparation of the evening meal. Pleasantries will greet my arrival, my wife will no doubt demonstrate the affection that has only intensified over the years, causing her mother to blush and her father to turn his eyes to the canvases that hang from the kitchen walls.

The first time my father-in-law set eyes upon those canvases he described them as nothing. Nothing. He wasn’t being rude, he admitted as much and I believe him, but that was the only way he could express himself. My wife laughed, as did her mother until I enquired what she saw in those same canvases. ‘I don’t know,’ was her response. ‘Nothing, if I’m honest.’

‘These canvases were being exhibited for the first time when we met,’ my wife told her parents, striding from canvas to canvas. ‘I love them as much today as I did back then,’ she continued, pausing at one and running the fingertips of a hand over the sharply peaked oil. ‘Maybe more.’

‘Really?’ her mother enquired politely. ‘That’s wonderful, dear.’

‘What’s this...’ Her father gestured at the canvases with a hand. ‘What do you call this collection?’ He looked to me with mild expectance, and a modicum of cynical interest.

‘The White Issue,’ I replied.

‘I don’t understand,’ her mother complained, turning to her daughter. ‘I don’t understand what it’s all about.’

‘Don’t worry, mummy,’ my wife said tenderly, going to her. ‘You don’t have to... Not any more.’