didnât notice the small things. But then, one Saturday when she spent the afternoon there, she saw that the corner cabinet was missing. What she noticed first was that the paint on the wall was less faded and then she saw the cabinet that had belonged to his grandparentsâheâd told her where it had stood in their house, how he had brought it west and refinished itâwas missing. All that was left was a cone of less faded paint. She made tea.
Other things were gone. When he went to the corner for milk, she opened a cupboard with only two cups although heâd always had a collection of mismatched cups, some beautiful if chipped, of a sort of old-fashioned elegance and thinness around which heâd spun stories that she was never sure were true about relatives and long afternoons. Now they were missing. She wondered what to say to him when he returned, pouring milk into the tea, and settling in to some reminiscence or other. She began and then stopped. She was after something more urgently than she could understand, but he was staring at her with the sort of intense blandness that sometimes accompanied their afternoons after bed, so she stopped.
She looked at the corner where the cabinet had been and saw the splatter paintings over screens she had done in grade school, with a toothbrush, a bit ofscreen in a frame, and a maple leaf. Once the leaf was lifted up, the white left on the page, the image of the leaf itself which was now damp and blue and curled, was pure white and somehow more than the limp thing she held between her fingers. The teacher sent them out to gather leaves in the fall so that on darkening afternoons they could do projects. She shook herself, she gathered what she could of her sense of purpose, she said sheâd see him later and he smiled at her blankly. She thought he wanted her to stay or go, either, but not to disturb the air as she moved.
He gave away his old tape player. Where is it, she began and then stopped. Why did you give it away? It was broken, he said, though she knew that a week ago it hadnât been broken, that they had sat in the fading light for two hours and listened to the Bach unaccompanied cello, and he told her heâd never had that tape, she was welcome to look, but when she did, it wasnât there.
And then he left the apartment and walked towards the bus stop and she was standing by her car wondering where he was going. He had a box of books under his arm. The books had begun to disappear as well and she wondered as she drove home if he were moving, and where was he moving and why she couldnât ask. Most of his books came from the library; he was one of the few she knew who used the library, but he had some few paperbacks, many smelling of foxing and paper dust. She liked going through the box he had under the bed.
He liked, she thought, to have her for an audience, going through the same photographs again and again of his young mother, his grandmother, and the picture of the porch with the snowball bush to the side. He could pass his thumb and fingers over these for hours and talk about the way heâd seen the storms coming, the exact weather in August, the ways people talked in those days. His stories varied little. She liked the sameness, the return to the same descriptions, the shaping of the shadow against the wall, the planks of the floorboards, the eyes of the knots in the wood.
Why then did she feel like shaking him, as if he were in a state of sleep? Why then did she feel sheâd entered a realm in which photographs lied? He hadnât ever been on that porch, heâd bought them with his old cups and his old books at a flea market, the family was someone elseâs altogether. Perhaps the photographs had been picked at random from some junk store, perhaps that woman in the flowered dress on the porch had no connection to him whatsoever and perhaps heâs never been on the porch at all. Would you like more tea, he asked