combed through the many operas, or plays, he knew by heart or his own personal memory—in any case, he hated the sound of her voice as he heard it, talking to him or reading a goodnight story to the children, and he hated the sound of her voice, because she could not sing on key the songs she liked, “This Old Heart of Mine” in particular, and he hated the sound of her voice for reasons that were not reasonable at all, the sound of delicately cooked tender flesh parts of a cow trapped inside her jaws—she was eating a piece of steak, it was the sound of her chewing. He loved her, oh yes, yes, so he did, and he hated her, especially the way in which she did things, small things, necessary things: like getting out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.
But he used to enjoy her company so, for he had the stature of a prince from the Tudor era and the ability to regard the rest of world as if it existed to satisfy his interests or to be vulnerable to his interests and all his interests belonged to him; yes, yes, in the life of the mind he used to love her and enjoy her way of wearing fruits and vegetables as if they were actual clothes, the way she walked into oncoming traffic, certain that it would halt before it turned her beautiful human form into something mushy, dead, something quickly forgotten; the way she would find the simplest thing extraordinary: she once caught forty-six mice in traps she had set and then could not believe that so many of something she hated and feared could exist; the way she towered over him, not physically, just her presence, her reality, she came from far away, she loved things with spices, she had never eaten grapes, apples, or nectarines when she was a child, she loved and she loved and she loved and Mr. Sweet fell in love with her because of the passion with which she could love all the many things that truly made up her true self, even though nothing about her would make him weigh his very own solid existence and judge himself wanting and decide that his existence, his life, his anything should be secondary to hers. But Mrs. Sweet did not know that, did not know of the ways in which Mr. Sweet’s imagination, his Now and his Then, his ways of seeing the present, the past and the future, colored the ways in which he saw her.
Here she is again: her naturally black hair, thick and coarse as ropes that were usually found in the hands of stevedores, cut off so short that she might be mistaken for a stevedore himself, the color of her hair was the color of new rope in the hands of a stevedore—blonde; her eyebrows removed with a razor and in their place a line drawn in the colors: blue—if she felt like it; green, if she felt like it; gold, if she felt like that then; her lips painted red, a red meant to reflect the color of the fires that burnt in one of the many lower circles of hell; her cheeks daubed with an orange goo that was the same color orange as the daylily, Hemoracallis fulva , a flower native to China but that now grows wild, unencumbered, without inhibition, in the northeastern part of the United States, an area in which the Sweets lived now, though it was unknown to Mrs. Sweet then, and revolting to Mr. Sweet’s consciousness then, and a nightmare for him now! But Then: when Mrs. Sweet was young and so ignorant, she, this lovely person now, then thought that to grow old was a mistake the person who had grown old had made, she thought that all the people who had grown old, had walked through a door, the wrong door, and if only they had chosen the correct door, that thinning and embarrassing folding up of the flesh would not have taken place, they would have continued to be as freshly made as the day they’d turned twenty-one or somewhere around then now, and not be a creaky something, complaining about their failing organs, just the way you do about a car that goes on and on and up and down the roads for a long time and the engine needs a new something, needs many new
But he used to enjoy her company so, for he had the stature of a prince from the Tudor era and the ability to regard the rest of world as if it existed to satisfy his interests or to be vulnerable to his interests and all his interests belonged to him; yes, yes, in the life of the mind he used to love her and enjoy her way of wearing fruits and vegetables as if they were actual clothes, the way she walked into oncoming traffic, certain that it would halt before it turned her beautiful human form into something mushy, dead, something quickly forgotten; the way she would find the simplest thing extraordinary: she once caught forty-six mice in traps she had set and then could not believe that so many of something she hated and feared could exist; the way she towered over him, not physically, just her presence, her reality, she came from far away, she loved things with spices, she had never eaten grapes, apples, or nectarines when she was a child, she loved and she loved and she loved and Mr. Sweet fell in love with her because of the passion with which she could love all the many things that truly made up her true self, even though nothing about her would make him weigh his very own solid existence and judge himself wanting and decide that his existence, his life, his anything should be secondary to hers. But Mrs. Sweet did not know that, did not know of the ways in which Mr. Sweet’s imagination, his Now and his Then, his ways of seeing the present, the past and the future, colored the ways in which he saw her.
Here she is again: her naturally black hair, thick and coarse as ropes that were usually found in the hands of stevedores, cut off so short that she might be mistaken for a stevedore himself, the color of her hair was the color of new rope in the hands of a stevedore—blonde; her eyebrows removed with a razor and in their place a line drawn in the colors: blue—if she felt like it; green, if she felt like it; gold, if she felt like that then; her lips painted red, a red meant to reflect the color of the fires that burnt in one of the many lower circles of hell; her cheeks daubed with an orange goo that was the same color orange as the daylily, Hemoracallis fulva , a flower native to China but that now grows wild, unencumbered, without inhibition, in the northeastern part of the United States, an area in which the Sweets lived now, though it was unknown to Mrs. Sweet then, and revolting to Mr. Sweet’s consciousness then, and a nightmare for him now! But Then: when Mrs. Sweet was young and so ignorant, she, this lovely person now, then thought that to grow old was a mistake the person who had grown old had made, she thought that all the people who had grown old, had walked through a door, the wrong door, and if only they had chosen the correct door, that thinning and embarrassing folding up of the flesh would not have taken place, they would have continued to be as freshly made as the day they’d turned twenty-one or somewhere around then now, and not be a creaky something, complaining about their failing organs, just the way you do about a car that goes on and on and up and down the roads for a long time and the engine needs a new something, needs many new
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