Heritance

What Is the Smell of a Circle?

Breast milk, yes, and tomato soup, fresh
algae blooming on the pond with one
carp quickening its surface. The egg-
colored rug on which snow slowly melted
from our boots. I remember
the slowness of the hour in which
we answered all the questions
our marriage counselor put to us.
Imagine one of you has gotten sick.
Imagine the schools
you want your children educated in.
And you and I, healthy
but with no children, would spend the rest
of an afternoon arguing about
private schools and cancer treatments,
until rage had pared your face
to an acid set of lines and planes,
so that at restaurants the waitresses
would arrive to fill only your glass
with water, and the female students
at your law school, hearing
of our troubles, delivered pies
for you with notes expressing
sympathy, which I devoured alone,
tossing the notes they’d taped on the tins
for you into the trash. I gained
five pounds that winter, lost fifteen
the spring you moved out. Perhaps,
I remember telling the counselor,
there are worse crimes than falling
out of love with one’s own husband or falling
into some worse version of it
with someone else, though at the time
I couldn’t imagine what those were.
Outside, in the counselor’s
parking lot, we would stand by the doors
of our separate cars, sullen and flushed,
as if each of us had contracted a specific
fever that began at the same hour
of the same day each week,
in the same location, even, the radiator
throwing off its blister
of heat, the rag rug, the counselor’s
window slowly filling up with snow. Only
after a week would the fever break, cooled
into half-hearted jokes,
or a stumbling embrace in our frozen yard:
some new understanding of what
we each could accept marriage to be,
not the same relationship but something
different, stranger, hard. I remember
walking past the bathroom door one night
and seeing you hunched there
over the sink, the wide, white
porcelain sides gripped in your palms, you
panting like a deer that had been struck
by a car. How much more pain
were we willing to endure to prove
we loved each other? Months
before we’d married, I remember we talked
about a child. It was Sunday, hot,
we’d been walking past the shut doors
of glass-fronted restaurants until we stopped
at a corner filled with shocking pink streaks
of bougainvillea. It’s the one thing,
you told me, I really want. You were talking
about the child. Heady vanilla scent, and bees.
The sudden sense, as you touched your hand
to the back of my neck, that I hated
this embrace. Was it cruel
I never told you no? Was it cruel
you kept demanding it of me? The longer
we argued, the harder it became
to decipher what cruelty finally was: Was it cruel,
for instance, if one of us chose to sleep
on the couch, was it cruel if I fantasized
about living in Europe, or you kept a portrait
of a former wife on the bookshelf?
On the last day of therapy together,
you interrupted the counselor
to say that in order to remain in any way
in my life, we would have to end the marriage
now. Do you understand? You asked me.
I touched my hand to the couch’s
fraying comforter. There was,
I understood, no unlimited care
anyone should endure for another;
that, in the end, it was indeed love
that could make a reasonable person
leave a marriage. When strangers ask
me to describe you now, I tell the truth:
You were kind, you were generous,
we never hated each other, even
on our worst night when I came
into the kitchen to tell you
what you already knew, I’d done something
terrible, not naming it because
you begged me not to. It was the one
kindness I ever offered. I remember
how you screamed and flung
all the dishes in our cupboard
to the floor, one by one until I stood
inside a ring of white and blue and green porcelain
that bloomed around me. Every dish
we ever owned you threw, but even then,
in our worst sorrow, making sure
not one shard would touch me.