The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (60 page)

“Good morning, Ken. Yes, we’re ready to go.”

Ken smiled and moved on.

A few minutes later Edmonds turned and looked for the old man. He was sitting alone reading a newspaper on the long bench seat at the very back of the bus. Edmonds stood up, walked to the end of the aisle and sat down next to him.

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all; it’ll be nice to have some company on this ride. I’m Ken Alford.” He put out his right hand.

“William Edmonds.” Both men gave a good strong shake.

“Is it Bill or William?”

“Bill, William—it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay Bill. Would you like some breakfast?” Out of his coat pockets Ken pulled a cheese Danish wrapped in plastic and a small red and white carton of chocolate milk. Edmonds gestured thanks but no thanks. Ken nodded, opened the milk and took a swig. Carefully capping it again he put it back into his pocket. With his teeth he tore open the plastic around the pastry and took a big bite. You could tell he really liked what he was eating because he kept closing his eyes and making mmh-
mmh
! sounds deep in his throat.

Edmonds liked that. Ken looked and sounded like one of those people on a TV commercial loving some new breakfast food or chocolate bar that was being promoted.

“This is the first time I’ve seen you on here, Bill.”

“Yes, it’s my first trip.”

“Well, some of them are good and some are stupid, but there’s always a part that’s worth it.”

The front door hissed shut and the bus pulled away from the curb.

“I lost my wife last Christmas and that’s when I started going on them. She didn’t like to travel much, not even day trips, so we stayed pretty close to home. Then when she got sick ...” Ken’s voice remained steady and unemotional.

Edmonds couldn’t talk about his dead wife without tearing up or his voice catching in his throat.

“Are you married, Bill?”

Edmonds looked at his hands. “My wife died too. Recently.”

“Ahh, that’s tough. I’m sorry to hear it.” But Ken didn’t sound sorry at all—if anything he sounded sort of ... buoyant. “Hold on—I want to show you something.” Stuffing the rest of the pastry into his mouth, he brushed off his hands and reached into another pocket. This time he brought out a very sleek, quite beautiful folding knife. “Look at this—It’s my Vedran Corluka.” He held it out for the other man to take, but Edmonds just stared at him.

“Why do you call it that? Vedran Corluka is a professional soccer player.”

Ken nodded and snapped his fingers. “Right! You’re a soccer fan too. Excellent. Yes, he plays for the Croatian national team. But I call it that for a reason. This was the last Christmas present my wife gave me. I like pocketknives; I have a collection. But this one—well, you can see how specially nice it is. She had it custom made by a guy in Montana. I liked it a lot when I got it, but only after she died did I really start paying attention to it.”

“Paying attention? What do you mean?”

“I went a little crazy after my Victoria died. We were married thirty-seven years and most of them were damned good. Did you have a good marriage, Bill?”

Edmonds nodded.

“Then you know what I mean. Vedran Corluka was her favorite player. She didn’t know beans about soccer, but liked his name. She liked to say it. Whenever I was watching a game on TV, she always came in and asked if
Vedran Corluka
was playing.

“So that’s why I named this knife that. It was her last present and he was her favorite player. I always carry it now. When I get really down, I just grip it tight in my pocket and that usually makes me feel a little better. It makes some of the sadness go away.”

“That’s a nice story. Can I see it?” Edmonds took the knife and examined it closely. It really was a beautiful object, but he was distracted because of what Ken was saying now.

“We don’t pay enough attention to things. We know that, but we do it anyway. Only after it’s over, or they’re dead, or it’s lost, or it’s too late do we realize we’ve been speed reading life or people or whatever and missing the details.

“So after Victoria died, I decided to go over everything I could—the things we owned, the memories I had, the memories other people had of her ... stuff like that. But this time I gave it every bit of my attention. You know, like
re-viewed
it like never before. It made such a difference!

“I can’t know my wife any longer because she’s gone. But I can know her better than before—when she was alive. If I pay close attention to the details, then I learn more about her all the time. I discover things I never knew or even thought about. It puts the woman in a whole new light—like in a way I’m just meeting her for the first time.

“Sure it’s a substitute for the real thing, but it’s all I’ve got left, Bill. It’s the best I can do.” Ken took the knife out of Edmonds’ hands and said, “I wrote the knife maker and asked if he had kept my wife’s letter ordering this. He returned it to me and I have it framed above my desk at home.

“See how beautifully the blade is carved? It’s got perfect balance too. That kind of work has to be done by hand. All the best things in life are handmade, Bill: Knife blades, bread, loving someone ...”

When Edmonds got home that afternoon he sat down on the couch in the living room while still in his coat and looked around at the place. Where was his Vedran? What could he carry in his pocket and always feel his wife’s presence through it?

What was the last present she had given
him
before she died? And what was the last one he had given her? Ashamed, he could not remember either gift. But was that really important? If you live together with someone for six thousand days so much is shared—does it matter if you can’t remember every little thing?

With this in mind, Edmonds walked around their apartment. When he saw something unfamiliar—a book, a porcelain figure, a knickknack—he picked it up and tried not put it down again until he could recall where the object came from, who had bought it, the circumstances, what was the reaction when it came to live with them, etcetera.

There were many things—the wooden nutcracker from the New York flea market, the ball made of hematite her sister had given them, and the amber carved elephant he’d brought his wife from Poland. Had she liked it? Distraught, he couldn’t remember. It was kind of a kitschy thing but nice too. He stared at the small tawny animal while trying to remember the details, any details about the day he had given it to her, what she’d said about it ... but he could not remember and it was mortifying.

There were so many blanks; his memory of their life together was full of black holes. He reviled himself for having forgotten so much about his wife and their time together. How could he be so careless? How could he have let so many particulars slip through the cracks? Memories of a good life shared were the only real treasure time permitted you to keep.

And what a personal insult to her! He lived in an apartment furnished with belongings that had decorated and enhanced their days. But now he couldn’t remember where too many of them came from or why they were even there.

Humbled and appalled, Edmonds moved around his home the next days like a tourist visiting a famous museum for the first time, only his guidebook was his flawed memories. Whenever he drew a blank looking at something, he studied the various objects until either their significance emerged, or he realized his recollection of them was dead forever. He moved those dead items to one corner of the living room and tried to avoid looking at them. He planned to put them in a closet and not think about them until he had sorted through what he
did
know.

When a week had passed, a whole week, he called Ken Alford and asked one question. The two men had had a nice day on the bus hanging around together and talking about their lives. At the end of it they had exchanged telephone numbers. Now after Alford answered, Edmonds identified himself and got right to the point. “Ken, what if I can’t find my Vedran? What if there’s not one single thing I can hold onto and feel better because I know she’s in it?”

“Oh it’s there, Bill. Somewhere in your life, or in your head, it’s there. You just haven’t found it yet.” The old man’s voice sounded amused and confident.

Edmonds lowered his head to his chest while pressing the receiver tightly to his ear. “But just the opposite’s been happening, Ken: the more I look for it, the more I discover that I don’t remember. I don’t remember so much ... It’s terrible. It feels like whole chunks of my brain have been cut out. In my own home things I neither recognize nor remember surround me. But they were all part of our life together!” Edmonds heard his voice at the end of the sentence and it sounded scared. He
was
scared.

Alford was silent a while but finally said, “Maybe the first half of life is meant for living, and the second half is for remembering—or trying to. When you consider it that way, both of us were wrong to waste time missing our wives after they died. Because mourning does no good: it only makes you feel helpless and lost. What we should do instead is try to remember and then savor whatever details we’re able to dredge up from our past. That’s possible and each time you do it, you feel good because it brings something more of them back to you; like you’re rebuilding them from scratch.” Ken suddenly laughed. “It’s a little bit like you’re making your own Frankenstein version of your wife out of what you remember about her.” He chuckled again and then went on. “I’m being facetious but you know what I mean. It’s one of the reasons why I always keep the knife in my pocket—touching it tells me to stop regretting and keep trying to remember.”

While listening to the other man speak, Edmonds held the amber elephant and turned it over and over in his hand. He wanted it to speak to him too. He wanted it to recount exactly what happened the day he gave it to his wife. What had she said? What was she was wearing? As Ken Alford talked, Edmonds closed his fingers around the elephant and silently mouthed the words “Tell me.”

A
T DINNER THAT NIGHT
he told her of his discovery. “I went on a secret mission today.”

Her eyes lit up and she nodded for him to continue because she loved his stories. She loved the way he
told
his stories.

“You know that apartment down on the third floor? The one they’ve been renovating forever?”

“Yes! We just talked about that last week, remember?”

“Well, I finally got the scoop on it. I noticed around noon every day that the workers leave for about half an hour for their lunch break. Most of the time they leave the door open, I guess to air it out. So I went down to investigate. I wanted to see what the hell they’ve been
doing
in there all this time.”

She smiled. Her boyfriend was always doing crazy stuff like this—going into places where he shouldn’t. Or asking total strangers embarrassing questions, taking chances that by all rights should have gotten him into a lot more trouble than it did. But even when he got caught most of the time he had the ability to charm his way out of most dicey situations. The guy was a scamp but a funny and delightful one when he needed to be. She wanted to hear this story at least partly because she was hoping he
had
been caught. She wanted to hear how he wiggled his way out of the soup this time.

“No one was down there when I went in, so I had a good fifteen minutes alone to explore the place.”

“And then they came back? What did you say? What happened?”

He loved her enthusiasm for his stories but disliked the way she always tried to push him fast forward to the conclusion. As if he should skip the joke altogether and cut straight to the punch line. “Wait! Let me tell the story.” He put out a hand palm-down and patted the air slowly, as if patting her on the top of the head to calm down and be patient.

She loved most of him but disliked the way he talked to her sometimes—as if she were nine years old.

“You know all the weeks they’ve been working? Well, it’s
empty
down there—totally empty. You’d think that after all this time the apartment would be ready to go, but it isn’t. Not one piece of furniture is in there—not a single piece. The place itself has been finished beautifully. A lot of money was spent on the details—parquet floors, limestone countertops, a kitchen with all these jazzy appliances. It looks like something on a space ship. Someone spent a ton of money, but the place itself is as empty as an ice skating rink in summer.”

She didn’t really hear the last part of what he said because she was envisioning and marveling at the idea of caramel colored parquet wooden floors and limestone countertops. She wanted an apartment like that! She often daydreamed about having an apartment or house with features like that to grace it. Bay windows with cushioned seats and a view of a beautiful countryside landscape—or the sea! The view from this apartment was onto a dingy busy street where car alarms went off endlessly and drunks sang at midnight. Sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep, she stood by the window and looked down on the street. She tried to pretend this apartment was somewhere else, somewhere romantic and exotic like Rome or Aix en Provence. That way at least it would be a dingy street in Rome and the voices down there would be speaking Italian and not saying things like “Fuck dat mothuhfuckuh.”

“Tell me what else is down there.”

“I just told you—nothing. The place is empty.”

Her voice jumped up to impatient. “I don’t
mean
that—I mean how else have they fixed the place up? Tell me some more of the details.”

Now he wanted to go on with the story—he didn’t want to stop and talk about appliances or what color doorknobs the place had. “It’s nice, it looks rich—I told you. Someone’s spending big money to fix it up. Anyway, about fifteen minutes after I got there, one of the workmen came back from lunch. He wasn’t surprised to see me, or at least didn’t act like it. He just kind of smiled and waited for me to say something. You know—tell him why I was there.”

She didn’t say anything; not a word to encourage him to continue the story. He looked at her closely and saw her irritation. Why? What had he done? Then he remembered and the thought irritated
him.
She could be so damned persistent when she wanted something. Closing his eyes he took a deep breath then let it out loudly and dramatically. “What more can I tell you about what’s inside the place? The floors were beautifully finished. The kitchen looks like a starship. Oh yeah, the bathroom has both a huge shower
and
bathtub in it. You’d love it.”