Man of Wax by Robert Swartwood Page B

whispered. We were spooning, my arm around her, holding her close.  
    I said, “Oh,” a little more than just disappointed (wanting to kick myself, really), and she had turned over so we could stare at each other. Around the room were a half dozen scented candles, and in the soft light I stared at the curve of her face, her dimples, the slight birthmark just beneath her chin.  
    She said, “Don’t say it like that. We’re so much more than soul mates.”  
    And then in the dark and quiet of our apartment bedroom, Jen told me the story of Plato’s Symposium, which was a recreation of a discussion among Greek philosophers concerning love. One of the philosophers there, Aristophanes, said that originally there weren’t two sexes, but three. That at the beginning of time there had been men, women, and beings of both man and woman, an androgynous sex. All of these creatures were round, with four hands and four legs and two faces on opposite sides of one head. They were strong and mighty, and it was said they dared to challenge the gods. Naturally Zeus wasn’t too pleased about this, and he came up with a plan to stop these creatures. He decided he would allow them to exist, but would weaken their power by cutting them all in half. When he did this the male creatures he cut apart became homosexuals, who pursued other males. The same with the female creatures. But the androgynous sex was split up so one half was male and the other half female, and pursued each other. So, according to the myth, we search the world for our other half, so when we find each other we can become whole again.  
    “But isn’t that just like soul mates?” I asked, once she was done speaking. I loved listening to her talk, the soft lilt of her voice, the way she always knew which words to speak and in which order to say them. It was what made her such a great lawyer, because it never took her long to formulate her argument, and to stick by it no matter what.  
    “Maybe,” she whispered. She leaned forward and lightly kissed me on the lips; I could taste the lip-gloss she’d applied earlier, still present after our lovemaking. “Either way you’re my other half.”  
    “Oh yeah? And how do you know that?”  
    “You laughed at my stupid elephant manure joke when no one else did.”  
    The next day I went to the jewelry store and asked if I could change the inscription. I didn’t even know if it would be possible. If it was possible, I figured it was going to cost a lot, probably more than I could even afford, but luckily they hadn’t done Jen’s yet, which had been a simple and generic: TO JEN WITH LOVE and our wedding date. Instead I had them change it to: TO JEN , MY OTHER HALF .  
    It was the first thing I looked for that Tuesday morning, sitting in my room on the seventh floor of the Grand Sierra Resort, as I held my wife’s finger in my hands.  
    I gently took off the ring the same way I’d first put it on, not trying to squeeze it over the flesh that had been so savagely cut off. It had gone pale in the hours it took to ship and didn’t feel like a living human finger at all. But still I knew it was hers, and when I finally slid the ring off and set the finger down on the bed, I moved close to the lamp on the bedside table to check.  
    And yes, there it was, the inscription I’d had put there the night after Jen told me the story she’d heard in one of her classes at school. That had also been the same night she woke from just one of her many nightmares. It was the first time I became aware of them at least, and she said she hadn’t had them for the longest time, not since we’d been together. She had assumed, or maybe just hoped, being with me kept them away.  
    While we’d been together almost four years she finally came out with something she had been holding back, what she said had been a dark period in her life. How in high school she’d been heavily into drugs, so much so that one night she actually tried to