Pictureless

A novella by

Ren Sakurai

Some things in life seem like they could only happen in a movie. Or a book, or a play. If it happened when you were with a friend, you’d turn to the friend and say, “Did that really just happen?” And then in a couple years you’d be out having a beer, and that friend would tell your other friends, “Guess what happened to Henry,” and she’d tell the story and everyone would say, “You’re kidding. That’s crazy. I can’t believe it.”

And the story would go something like this.

It was on a Sunday morning when my wife dropped the bomb on me.

Not a real bomb. I’m speaking proverbially here, although proverbial bombs are agonizing in their own right.

I was in the garage tinkering with an old dehumidifier that wouldn’t turn on, when I heard Luna come in through the door leading from the kitchen. I knew it was Luna because there was no one else in the house. We didn’t have kids or pets; it was just us. I thought that had been enough.

“Morning, honey,” I said without turning around. Now, looking back, I wish I would have stopped what I was doing, turned to look at her full in the eyes, and given her my full attention.

In my defense, I’d taken apart the dehumidifier’s compressor and was close to having it reassembled, but the process involved some pretty dexterous maneuvers to hold it in place while screwing it all back together.

That’s when I smelled the perfume—my first tipoff that something was amiss.

We’d made no plans that day, so there was no real reason for the perfume. Still maintaining my precarious hold on the compressor, I turned and was surprised to see her wearing an outfit that didn’t match the occasion: black skirt, gray tights, and her favorite sweater—this nice white, knit thing which, I’m sure she knew, accentuated her smallish breasts, but tastefully so. She knew I was putty in her hands whenever she wore that outfit. Which made what came next that much more unbearable.

I have to wonder what her thought process was when she was getting dressed. Come at it from the angle of looking frumpy and undesirable, or twist the knife a little? Knowing Luna, she would have just wanted to look presentable, realizing it would be a momentous event—for both of us.

Luna didn’t return my greeting. Instead, she just said, “Can we talk?”

My stomach nosedived. “Now’s not really a good time.” What I meant was: Nothing good ever comes after the words “can we talk.” I looked down at the compressor in my hands, knowing that if I didn’t keep holding it together, it would all come apart.

She pursed her lips. “Can you put that thing down?”

“Not really.”

“This is important, Henry.”

It was a moment of truth for me. I looked again at the compressor.

I decided to keep holding it together.

“I’m afraid it will come apart again.” I tried to laugh. “Do you want to see a grown man cry?”

She would, indeed, but for a different reason altogether.

Luna winced, almost imperceptibly so. Or maybe she’d tried to smile, but it was a smile full of pity made only for the sake of propriety. She was only doing it so she could move on to the business at hand.

“I want a divorce, Henry.”

The words died from her lips, but they echoed through my head, again and again. At the same time, it felt like I was going to lose my breakfast all over the floor. I hesitate to call it shock. It was more like the moment after the initial trauma subsides and everything suddenly begins to make sense.

“Did you hear me?” she asked.

I tried to say something, but it felt like the gigantic hand of God had just reached down from Heaven, wrapped His fingers around my throat, and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe.

“Henry, are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right!”

“Calm down, please.”

“I am calm, goddamn it!” I think that was the first time I’d ever deliberately lied to her.

“Why don’t we go in the house and talk?”

“We can talk right here.”

She looked down and folded her hands in front of her skirt. In any other circumstance, she would have looked demure—sweet, almost.

Then the questions started coming at me, like ants trying to escape from a flooded anthill. “What did I do wrong?”

She pursed her lips and turned away, as if she were taking an inappropriately timed inventory of the lawn implements hanging on the garage wall. “It’s been a long time coming, Henry. You know it has.”

“I do?”

“Well, if you don’t, you should. I don’t know how to say this gently, Henry, but you’re kind of an asshole.”

This shocked the hell right out of me. “How am I an asshole?”

“It’s the things you say when you think you’re being witty, but really you’re just being an asshole. You look down on literally everyone.”

What? Where the hell was this coming from? “Where the hell is this coming from?”

“Ask anyone. Ask Hope.”

Hope is my sister, three years my junior at thirty-four, five-foot-two, and a hundred pounds after binge-eating over the holidays, but every ounce of her wired for battle. She damn-near breathes fire, my sister does.

“Jesus, Luna. She’s the most sarcastic person in the world. She’s not exactly unbiased.”

“That’s my point, Henry. Even she thinks you’re a jerk.”

“Well, which one am I, an asshole or a jerk?”

“Well, there you go, Henry.” She made a sweeping hand gesture. “Thank you for illustrating my point.”

“What did I say?”

“But it’s more than that. It’s everything. It’s all the little things. How you’re always fixing things, but how you never really pay attention to me. How you don’t kiss me goodbye in the morning. How you don’t kiss me goodnight.”

“That’s not fair! I kiss you goodnight every night.”

“I don’t consider that little grandma’s peck a real kiss.”

“Well, I didn’t think you wanted a tongue down your throat while you were trying to read in bed.”

She winced. “Well, maybe that would have been nice, once in a while.”

It wasn’t lost on me that she’d said “would have been.” Not “would be.” In her mind, I was already in the past tense.

The memory came to me of the first time I told her I loved her. I remember every detail about that moment: my car parked in a downtown rainstorm, vicious sky dark and furious, but inside the car was safe, warm, comfortable. It felt like home. I’d turned the radio on low and kissed her neck and told her I loved her. And I remember what she had told me. She’d quoted Shakespeare.

“What happened to ‘If music be the food of love, play on’?” I asked her now, wishing things could go back to the way they’d been but knowing they could never. I wanted to hold her hand again and kiss her neck and whisper lines from Twelfth Night.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“That’s what you said to me in the car. When I told you I loved you.”

Luna pursed her lips. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, you did.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, but ‘love is begun by time, and time qualifies the spark and fire of it.’”

That’s Luna for you: always with the upper hand.

The compressor creaked. I shifted to hold it more tightly.

“Look, I know I haven’t been very attentive lately,” I said, “but I can work on it. I still love you, you know.”

“Well, I don’t,” she murmured. Her gaze dropped. “Love you, I mean.”

I didn’t have anything for that. Instead, I focused on the compressor. A sense of proprioception overtook me; I felt every shift, every intake of breath, every heartbeat, as if the compressor would erupt with even the slightest motion.

“I’ve already started the paperwork,” Luna said gently. “You just need to sign it. Okay?”

“No, it’s not okay!”

“Henry, settle down, please.”

“Don’t tell me to settle down.” I tried to calm myself. I needed to have all my faculties for this conversation. She’d had time to prepare for it—rehearsed it, knowing Luna. But I’d been blindsided by it. I just wanted to think clearly. “What about … what is it called? Couples therapy? Marriage counseling? Isn’t that what Joe and Elsie did? They’re still together.”

Luna made a sharp sound that wasn’t exactly a laugh. “And they’re miserable, Henry.” She softened her voice. “You don’t want to end up miserable, do you?”

“Yes, Luna. That’s been my ulterior motive from Day One: to end up miserable.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Being a jerk. Your sarcasm tells me that you think so little of what I just said that you have to make fun of it.”

“Make fun of it? If it’s not obvious, Luna, fun is the last thing this is.”

“And there you go again. You never take what I say in the spirit of how I say it. You just pick apart the words, like you’re some kind of …” She sputtered. “… word picker-aparter.”

“I could have a field day with that.”

Luna shook her head, working the muscle in her jaw.

Deep in my brain, I started thinking that maybe she was right and that I had been focusing more on the words than on her intention behind them. Then again, the intention behind her words was the very thing that I was afraid of. Maybe that was my whole problem all along. I liked keeping things at the surface. I don’t like it when people pry too deeply.

“Look, Luna. Of course I don’t want us to be miserable.”

It was a mistake to say that; a good debater will typically never directly answer a question, because the minute he does, he’s allowed himself to be led down his opponent’s line of reasoning. And the further he goes down that road, the more likely he’ll end up arriving at his opponent’s conclusion.

“Well, then we’re in agreement.”

“What? No, we’re not!”

“You just said—”

“I know what I said!”

“Can you just calm down, please?”

“Stop saying that!”

She looked at me full in the eyes then, and, in that moment, there was such loathing and disgust that I knew it was no use. She’d already moved on. When you live with someone for thirteen years, you come to know their expressions. And her expression meant: “I’m done with this and have been for a while.”

A wave of emotions hit me then: despair, self-pity, regret, humiliation. And perhaps this is when the mind is at its weakest, for it can steel itself against one form of agony, but when it is assaulted on many fronts, its only recourse is to capitulate.

I cried.

And because I was so heartbroken and ashamed, I did the only thing I could think of.

I turned back to the compressor and tried again to put it back together, even as the tears rolled from the tip of my nose and wet my hands as I worked.

I was only vaguely aware of Luna’s presence. She stood there a moment, I’m not sure how long, probably watching me work with that same look of loathing and disgust on her face. Then she turned and wordlessly left the garage. When she shut the door leading into the kitchen, she barely made a sound.

I struggled with the compressor for a while longer, the emptiness in me getting wider and wider until it felt like there should be nothing left of me. Finally, after a valiant struggle, I gave up. I put the compressor gently on the workbench. Then I let go. In a shower of springs and screws, it burst apart, baring its insides to the world.