Читать книгу The Fifth Woman - Nona Caspers - Страница 14

THE GUN

I kept a gun in the bottom drawer of my dresser. The black metal barrel like a dog’s snout. The chamber—which did move and could hold bullets—was empty. If Michelle had been alive, she would never have let me keep it. But, if she had been alive, this story never would have happened.

I found the gun while digging up a plant behind the rhododendron grove in the park. I wanted to bring the plant—the one that bloomed purple flowers she had liked—into my apartment for company. The park was so big, and so many plants flourished there, including many of these unofficial plants, that I didn’t think it would miss the one. I had brought a plastic bag with paper towels soaked in water tucked inside. I had excavated the roots and was ready to put them into the bag when the black metal of the gun glimmered up at me. Without really thinking about what I was doing, and even though I knew I should report the gun to the police, I plucked it out of the ground, unplugged the dirt from its barrel, wiped off the metal with my watchman’s cap, and slipped it into my jacket pocket.

Home in my studio apartment above the alley, I laid the gun on a towel on my small writing table. The plant fit nicely into a clay pot I had found in the alley some time earlier. I put the plant on the table next to the gun.

That night I went to the movies. In the movie I saw, Gregory so desperately loves Clara he can see no other way to be with her but to shoot her husband; the dead man’s blood trickles out from his chest onto the kitchen floor like a red string. They will never be happy, I thought. Yet, in the next scene, Gregory and Clara are holding hands outside a hut in the mountains of Chiapas. They cook over fire and are teaching children to read. Clara cuts her hair and wears bandannas; Gregory tans an earthy brown and grows a beard.

I wanted the movie to end with them building a school or something, but of course they are caught. In the final scene Clara sits under a thatched canopy reading a book. A shadow of a figure blocks the light and darkens her back; her bandanna is askew; she delicately straightens it, and turns. The music imitates a heartbeat to tell us that she has been waiting for this ending. Gregory is walking down a hill toward her, in time with the music. He slows—surprise and then recognition. The camera zooms in to his face, which looks nothing like the face of the desperate lover with the gun in the beginning of the movie.

The movie ends.

When Michelle’s cousin finally answered my knock she was wearing a robe made out of quilts.

“Michelle had a robe like that,” I said.

She looked at me. I wanted her to invite me in, to offer me something to drink. She had moved to the City in spring and now it was summer and we hadn’t seen each other since the funeral.

I stood at the door waiting.

She told me she couldn’t let me in because she hadn’t fully unpacked or cleaned her house. “The dust,” she said. “The clutter.” As soon as she spoke, I knew why I was there—they had the same voice, deep and solid as tree bark.

I told her I didn’t mind dust or clutter, I would shut my eyes if she wanted me to, I would walk in backward, or she could blindfold me.