Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 22

Iron

A week later, she was so filled with his absence that she rose in the middle of the night and took the winter quilt down from the upper shelf of the wardrobe. She lay it on top of her, spreading her legs and wrapping them around it, but that didn’t satisfy her yearning for the weight of him. So she piled her pillows on top of the quilt, but the pale replication of the sensation only made her yearn for him all the more.

No wonder he doesn’t come back to me, she thought. Who would want a woman who pretends that a pile of bed linens is her lover?

She replayed the sensations of that night—his rough hand on her cheek, the thrust of his fingers inside her, the way he smelled at the beginning of their lovemaking, of bay rum and wine and onions. And how, as he sweated away on top of her, those smells gave way to something mustier and thicker, his own smell, as distinct as the whorls of his fingerprints. The way he said, “Simone, Simone.” His heartbeat.

At her father’s funeral, there had been prayer cards showing Mary’s heart, crowned and adorned with a chaplet of roses, hovering above her breast. It looked nothing like the hearts of pigs and goats and sheep set out for sale in the market, lumpy and dripping. Simone had thought of Mary keeping the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, pondering them in her heart. Mary must have had a doorway in her chest which she opened to take out her heart, and then reached into the gap for the stored gifts of the magi, which she removed to ponder—the French word is repassant, also used for the task of ironing—a physical action, rubbing the flasks and reliquaries, as her mother worked a dishtowel over an already dry glass or as Simone found her hand between her legs, rubbing the place for which she had no name.