Arthur was the sort of man who was suspicious of things he didn’t fully understand.
He was in construction and was a hard, honest worker, although he did not have a beard. He felt most comfortable with items he could take apart and put back together; everything else, he thought, tended to be more trouble than it was worth. This way of thinking shone from his eyes and curved his mouth down slightly at the corners, so he didn’t do well with most people.
Agatha, his wife, understood Arthur and loved him anyway. Arthur believed without question that Agatha was wonderful; in turn, she did her best to be a simple sketch of a person, so that Arthur could comfortably delude himself into believing he knew her all the way through. To maintain the illusion, Agatha tried very hard not to express opinions about people or philosophy or, God forbid, politics. She satisfied herself with simple hobbies like cooking and reading books by Ruth Hogan and watching Formula 1 racing. Most of all she was very careful to keep complex emotions from showing on her face.
The only outlet Agatha allowed herself was journaling. Beginning on the day after her wedding to Arthur, she slowly and steadily poured her deepest feelings and occasional remarks on the weather into a series of leather-bound, college-ruled notebooks. But she was always careful to keep the books hidden behind the large jars in the spice cabinet. Arthur never cooked and so never suspected.
The two of them lived together in this way in a gray house in the suburbs for a long time. Life flowed around them and sometimes through them. Somehow they managed to be a little bit happier than you might expect, but they never had children.
Then, one day while Arthur was at work and Agatha was watching Lewis Hamilton finish third in the Canadian Grand Prix, Agatha found that her left arm had gone numb. Several minutes later, she discovered that it was more difficult than usual to breathe. A practical woman, she deduced what was happening, calmly called for an ambulance, and was swiftly driven to Hocking Valley Hospital, where with minimal fuss she died of a heart attack.
Arthur was distraught.
Despite his best efforts, he could not understand Agatha’s death, since it was not something he could take apart and put together. He was sixty-three and his natural distrust still shone from his eyes, but now it was mixed with a harsh, resigned sadness that was even more off-putting. After the funeral, he continued to do poorly with people and live in the gray house, but Agatha’s absence made it too big for him. He was continually attacked by reminders of her: the Ruth Hogan books on the shelves, the Lewis Hamilton posters in the dining room. The extra empty space made his sadness echo off the walls and come back to him louder. He decided to move. He prepared the home for sale.
It was at this point that he cleaned out the spice cabinet.
As he was removing the heavy filled jars of cumin, paprika, and dried basil, Arthur found a row of leather-bound, college-ruled notebooks with Agatha’s name and a span of dates on the covers – one book for each year of marriage. There were forty-two books in total. They had been married a long time and it was a large spice cabinet.
A part of Arthur felt that he should respect the privacy of his late wife, but the larger part of him burned with curiosity and a longing to hear from her again. Anyway, she was dead. So he started reading. By the time he closed the forty-second notebook, he had pins and needles in both feet, an incredible need to use the bathroom, and a mental image of his wife that had been shaken like a pillowcase and left inside out.
He might have discounted the books as some sort of hoax had they not been written in Agatha’s neat hand, marked by her practical style of speaking, and interspersed with her familiar observations on the weather. But the substance! Agatha had vigorously disagreed with Wittgenstein’s application of language to metaphysics. She had designed a thoughtful system for the provision of universal healthcare, accounting for access in rural areas. She had wrestled with questions of self-worth and had never really liked Ruth Hogan.
Had he ever really known her at all?
This problem needed to be picked apart, so Arthur sat for a long time thinking about it. In his mind, he walked back through their marriage, taking forty-two years one day at a time, trying to reconcile each moment with Agatha to the blazing, kaleidoscopic soul that jumped out at him from the pages of her journals.
He couldn’t do it. The gap was too wide. She remained Agatha. He threw away the books.
Arthur cleared out the spice jars, sold the house, and moved to Phoenix. He never remarried or considered it, not because he was distrustful, but because he knew, deep down, that he’d loved her.
