Head Wounds
Page 33
Returning to the sofa, I poured myself another drink, then picked up Barbara’s unfinished manuscript from the coffee table. Her scholarly work on linguistics that she’d dedicated to me.
But I didn’t open it. Not just yet. I needed time to let the truth of my feelings speak to me.
And to listen to what they had to say.
From the moment I’d received the dossier, my desire to find out what really happened that deadly night long ago was prompted mostly by a sense of duty. By what I believed was my obligation to Barbara. In honor of our past love.
But what I couldn’t do then—and still couldn’t now—was locate that love in the present, the actual living love that I once had for her. It was as if all that remained was the memory of having loved her. Before. In another life.
I took a deep breath, then let myself lie back against the sofa cushions. Instinctively closing my eyes.
Maybe this was what it meant to be “moving on.” Now there’s a cold, unrepentant phrase. Accurate, perhaps, though something about its self-justification has always bothered me.
Whatever I might call what I was feeling, I couldn’t deny that I felt it. No matter what it did or didn’t say about me.
And then I recalled something written many years ago by John Fowles, one of my favorite authors: “All pasts are like poems. You can derive a thousand things, but you can’t live in them.”
I always treasured the wisdom in those words. And I knew that they were true.
So, eyes still closed, I pictured Barbara in my mind. And silently thanked her for our brief, passionate, and complicated life together.
I sat like that for a good long while. And then I opened her manuscript.
It was an academic work deconstructing some conventional wisdom regarding linguistics. Since it wasn’t my field, I didn’t grasp all of it. But even I could appreciate its subtlety, its profound insight. And wished that she’d been able to finish it.
Then I heard the words echo in my mind. Clear and bittersweet.
Good-bye, Barbara.
I turned the last page.
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