Kymm

That wooden thing he had displayed on the bookshelf like a piece of modern art – to me it looked more like some religious relic – kept me up at night. I had emptied the kitchen drawers of all his fancy doohickeys and William Sonoma gadgets; I’d sorted out his clothes (shall I confess to keeping a clean pair of boxers in his underwear drawer?) and allotted appropriate recipients. My Dad got a woolen winter coat, I gave his brother a brand new pair of shoes, and I kept a couple of t-shirts for myself.###
None of his books were any I would read, most being treatises on economics, Marxism or the Cuban revolution, so they all went in the trash. Yup, I don’t apologize: into the dumpster. I kept the ones we gave each other on a special shelf I cleared, titles at eye level.###
I put his dead mother’s ceramics on the very top shelf, where I never looked and would not notice the dust they carried.###
When I was done with that, it was time to deal with his couch, which was too old to keep and pointless to reupholster, so I bought another one that was the same size, shape and color.###
Photographs were tucked away in boxes, a few souvenirs from his family –why were there all those funeral cards?- were hidden in drawers and that was that. Until I noticed the chunk of wood.###
I have to admit that I hadn’t really noticed it before. When I looked, all I saw was a piece of wood that seemed to accompany the sculpture of a Pregnant Woman (She Was Carrying a Boy) that we had bought at an art fair one Easter. Now that I looked more closely, it was obvious that it had nothing to do with the sculpture. It reminded me of an Ikea futon I’d finally given away a few years earlier, but there were no uneven breaks in the smoothly polished surface, just an odd, articulated stub.###
It might have been part of a collection, if he had collected anything, which he didn’t. Neither did it form part of any hobby, for he had never indulged in hobbies. It had been awful and disquieting to discover how little space he actually occupied.###
Thus it was that I remained so reluctant to dispose of this ungainly piece of wood. There was a surfeit of space for his memory, and yet I felt there was something missing, maybe something missing in me because I could not give the object a name, much less a purpose or meaning. Yet it had been his. He had placed it there at some point, for some reason, and I did not know why.###
It wasn’t like finding a key to an unidentifiable lock, or a packet of love letters, or a box of whips and chains, but it was just as disconcerting. Had I asked, he might easily have said ‘It’s not mine, it’s yours ‘ or ‘I keep meaning to ask you what the hell it’s for!’ But now it sat beside the Lady Pregnant with Baby Boy sculpture, and immediately began mocking me. How self-involved could a person be to not know what this wooden thing was, what it meant to him, what its history was, under what circumstances he had come to possess it. Forget about those people in his photo albums (just open the rings and entire pages disappear), those names in his old address books. This block of wood with its smooth curves and articulated joint (was it part of some avant-garde train set?) sat imperviously upon the bookshelf, challenging our time together, disdaining the home we had built, scorning my loss.###
Soon, every morning I would pause by the bookshelf on my way into the kitchen, rub the sand out of my eyes, and stare at the wooden thing, willing it to reveal itself to me. It became the first thing I saw when I snapped on the lights upon returning home every evening. Late at night, as I contemplated returning to fitful sleep and dark, insomniac dreams, I would again stand before it and stare, trying to make sense out of things being an integral part of my life and then not being a part of life at all.###
I considered taking it off the shelf and putting it in a closet, but when I moved it away from the sculpture (Pregnant Woman, It’s a Boy) I had a violent premonition that engulfed me in sorrow and guilt. I put the pointless wooden object back in its place and felt a rush of relief. I stepped back from the shelf and when I looked at it again it was with tenderness. No tears sprang to my eyes, my throat did not contract, I was not saddened, angry or even perplexed. I decided that this feeling of sudden joy was really nothing more than an easy contentment. And because it was something I hadn’t felt in such a long time, I confused it, was willing to confuse it, with joy.