The Wooden Sea Read Online Free Page B

in her eyes but didn't speak.

    "It's a question, Susan, not an accusation."

    "Was your breakup your fault or your wife's?"

    "Mine, I guess mine. Gloria got bored with me and started fucking around."

    "Then it was her fault!"

    "Blame is always convenient because it's so decisive: My fault. Your fault.
    But marriage is never that clear-cut. He pisses you off here, you piss him off there. Sometimes you end up with a toilet bowl so full neither of you can flush it."
    That conversation made me miss and realize again how grateful I was for my wife. It made me want to see her immediately so I went home for lunch. But Magda wasn't there and neither was Pauline. Different as they were, the two women liked hanging around together. Anyone would like hanging around with Magda. She was funny, tough, and very perceptive. Most of the time she knew exactly what was good for you even when you didn't. She was stubborn but not unbending. She knew what she liked. If she liked you, your world became bigger.

    My first wife, the inglorious Gloria, shrunk the world like heavy rain on leather shoes and made me feel like I no longer fit in it. She was beautiful, endlessly dishonest, bulimic, and as I later found out, promiscuous as a bunny. At the end of our relationship I found a note she had written and in all likelihood left out for me to see. It said, "I hate his smell, his sperm, and his spit."

Page 16
    Eating lunch alone, I contentedly sat in the living room listening to my thoughts and the buzz of a lawnmower someplace far away. If her marriage really was finished, I did not envy Susan the next act of her life. In contrast, I was at a place in my own where I didn't envy anyone anything. I liked my days, my partner, job, surroundings. I was working on liking myself but that was always an ongoing, iffy process.

    Over the friendly smell of my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, an increasingly pungent fragrance of something else began to butt in. I didn't pay much attention while eating, but it became so pervasive as I slipped an afterlunch cigarette between my lips that I stopped and took a long, serious sniff.

    The nose can be like a blind mole brought up into the sunlight. Below ground--in your unconscious--it knows exactly what it's doing and will guide you: That stinks--stay away. That's good--have a taste. But bring it above ground, demand to know _What's that smell, _and it moves its blind head around and around in confused circles and loses all sense of direction. I asked out loud, "What _is _that fucking smell?" But my nose couldn't tell me because _that _smell was an incomprehensible combination of aromas I had loved my entire life.
    This is a crucial point, but I don't know how to describe it so it makes better sense.

    A whore I visited in Vietnam always wore a certain kind of orchid in her hair. Her English was minimal so the only understandable translation she could come up for the flower was "bird breath."
    Naturally when I got back to the States and asked, no one had ever heard of a bird breath orchid. And I never smelled it again until that afternoon in my living room in Crane's View, New York, nine thousand miles from Saigon.
    Naturally my brain had long ago put the aroma in its dead-letter file and forgotten about it.
    Now here it was again.
    Remember me?

    But it was only one in a swirling, illusive combination of cherished smells.
    Cut grass, wood smoke, hot asphalt, sweat on a woman you are making love with, Creed's
    "Orange Spice" cologne, fresh-ground coffee... my list of favorites and there were more. All of them were there together _at the same time _in the air. Once it had my full attention, neither my conscious nor unconscious mind could believe it.

    I had to stand up, had to find where it was coming from or I'd go crazv. The trail led to the garage. I remembered that in our conversation earlier, Magda had said how good it smelled in there.
    What an understatement! No room freshener out of a can could have