H<\/span>er ex-husband had been in a terrible accident.\u00a0 Biking alone in the Hudson Valley, he had lost control on a downhill and crashed into a tree, breaking several ribs and his scapula.\u00a0 He\u2019d been wearing a helmet, but had sustained a brain injury.\u00a0 Now their son had flown up from DC to New York to be with him; his present wife was constantly by his side, through the ICU and emergency surgery, through the hospital stay and then the move to a rehab facility where he was learning, slowly, to identify photographs of animals and the names of the people who surrounded him.\u00a0 There were a lot of people; he was a popular language professor, regarded as a leading translator of contemporary Slavic verse.\u00a0 One of his books was widely used as a textbook. He had a stream of visitors when he was able to have them, and many offers of support from students, colleagues, and friends.<\/p>\n

The ex-wife knew this from the blog a teaching assistant had set up on a web site called Caring Heart.\u00a0 She was in Italy, on sabbatical, working on an architectural book about Ravenna. She had been spending her time thinking about sepulchers made of porphyry and the fates of Byzantine monarchs, watching the light reflect off the gold haloes of martyred saints walking in a bright mosaic procession toward Jesus and Mary and the angels.\u00a0 Her thoughts had been centered on churches and basilicas, and on a restaurant where she often ate and where she drank, most evenings, a Campari spritz followed by a carafe of red wine.\u00a0 She would go home to the apartment she rented, not far from where Byron had once lived with Teresa Guicciolo.\u00a0 There she would have more wine, enough to allow her to pass into a restless sleep before waking in the middle of the night, sweating from a hot flash.\u00a0 She would read for an hour or so, and then, if she couldn\u2019t get back to sleep, would tap out a Xanax, swallow half with a glass of acqua minerale, and thereby lose another morning of work.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Now she spent those late moments of the night on Caring Heart, reading about her former husband.\u00a0\u00a0 The entries were written by his assistant and a close colleague, and sometimes by his wife.\u00a0 He was agitated, and had pulled out all the tubing and tried to rise from bed; he was calm and serene and loving, or angry and sarcastic.\u00a0 He called his son by his dead brother\u2019s name, and pulled the covers over his head and refused to eat, or struggled forward with a walker, making it halfway down the hall. There were loving messages from everyone he knew; the ex-wife, herself, had written a couple of them: Wishing you a fast recovery. Thinking of you all during this difficult time.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

What she felt, but did not write, was that she was jealous. It was a dark, self-pitying jealousy, and it moved like a black wave over all the images that passed through her mind, leaving behind its bitter salt.<\/p>\n

Their son had once been angry with his father, in his late adolescence, but that had long passed, and for the past several years they had enjoyed a close relationship.\u00a0 Her own relationship with her son had gone from an easy intimacy (he had been hers alone as a baby and toddler, while her husband was busy with teaching) to a distant politeness that frustrated her, and that she did not understand.\u00a0 Her son treated her as a casual acquaintance, one he did not particularly want to know further; he rarely called or wrote.\u00a0 While she, as always with her emotions, was overwhelmed by their ferocity and did her best to tamp them down to an acceptable level.\u00a0 Otherwise, she noticed, people tended to edge away from her,as though a glass had just shattered at their feet.\u00a0 Now her son was closer to his father than ever.\u00a0 The entries on the web site often mentioned the word family<\/em>, the family being, of course, her ex-husband, their son, and the wife of the past ten years.\u00a0 The three of them were like a beautiful painting or fresco, perfectly proportioned, luminous with religious meaning.\u00a0 Mary flanked by two hovering angels, or holding her veil playfully above an infant Jesus while Joseph stood meditatively in the background. The hand of God, the suffering Christ, and the white dove.\u00a0 Whereas she, the ex, was one. An aberration.\u00a0 She was a drunken apostate.<\/p>\n

Her former husband was a good man, and she had screwed up the marriage. The last year they were together, she had begun an affair with one of his graduate students.\u00a0 She had lied about where she went, invented a friend named Veronica who often needed her, had come home from fucking her lover all afternoon straight into the shower and then to the living room to greet her husband.\u00a0 She could not remember, now, why she had done these things.\u00a0 There had been a vague but persistent dissatisfaction, a longing for\u2014but she never knew what.\u00a0 She had finally told him about the affair; her lover had left her, she was (she thought) miserably in love, she might (she also thought) get back together with her lover, without the obstacle of the marriage.\u00a0 Their son was twelve at the time.\u00a0 She had screwed up her relationship with him, too, and for what?\u00a0 Afterwards there had been a handful of men, including one who was married, who had at one time promised to leave his wife, who did not leave, and she found herself alone.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Ravenna, there were bicycles everywhere, and no one wore a helmet.\u00a0 Every day, she was reminded of her ex-husband.\u00a0 It was unclear how many of his abilities he might regain after the insult to his brain. Everyone was trying to be upbeat and hopeful.\u00a0\u00a0 The doctors had said that full recovery was unlikely. She remembered what a kind, fair man he had been; even after he knew about the infidelity, and the marriage was over, he had shared care of their son and been generous in terms of finances.\u00a0 It hurt her to think that now he would be reduced; he might not be able to return to teaching, or even care for himself.<\/p>\n

Today, she learned from his wife\u2019s entry on Caring Heart, he was going to be forced to leave the rehab facility. Their insurance would not pay for him to stay longer.\u00a0 He would need round-the-clock care for an indefinite amount of time. People were volunteering to run errands, offering money and places to stay. The wife wrote that sometimes it was all too much for her.\u00a0 I want him back the way he was<\/em>, she wrote.\u00a0 The ex-wife felt incredibly mean of spirit, but there it was, that thick, viscous surge of feeling: she still envied the wife.\u00a0 The wife who today was packing up his things, helping him out the glass doors, taking him home.\u00a0 They would have a quiet dinner with her son, who was staying with them as long as he was needed.\u00a0 He would sit with his iPad in the living room, near his father on the couch.\u00a0 His father would have his stocking feet on the coffee table; maybe he would be trying to decipher a book, or simply be leaning back against the cushions, tired and drawn-looking; every now and then a small ripple of confusion would pass over his face, and then subside.\u00a0 She did not want to be on the outside, feeling like a voyeur to his suffering.\u00a0 She wanted to be, again, a part of what they had had together, what she had foolishly thrown away.<\/p>\n

She read the wife\u2019s journal entry at five am and could not get back to sleep, even with an entire Xanax.\u00a0 She lay in the dark remembering the early years of her marriage.\u00a0 She had slept beside her husband easily, insensibly, night after night, never waking.\u00a0 In the mornings she would curl against his back, and he would reach behind and pull her arm around him. He would come home from his classes and drop a stack of books and papers on the dining room table, where he liked to work. They would cook dinner together, drinking wine he would have opened while telling her about the vintage or the origins of the wine, then pouring her a bit to taste before he filled their glasses.\u00a0 Soon their son would be born, and she would cradle him in the crook of her arm as she stirred soup or risotto, or put him in his playpen, where he would lie looking up at a mobile of plush farm animals in his solemn way. Their young family\u2014husband, wife, new son\u2014had seemed inviolable, like a photograph or painting; in her memory it was still there, perfectly framed, glassed-in and inaccessible.<\/p>\n

Around seven am she rose, exhausted, and walked down the street for a cappuccino and croissant at her usual caf\u00e9.\u00a0 She went to another caf\u00e9 on the Via di Roma for a second cappuccino and tried to read a monograph on medieval iconography, but mostly she sat, looking out the window, thinking about her former life.\u00a0 It had been a good life.\u00a0 She had destroyed it, and out of that her husband had built a new one.\u00a0 She had built nothing.\u00a0 After Ravenna she would go back to Boston to the small studio apartment she owned, where she lived with an ailing cat and a wall of shelves filled with books, where a folding futon doubled as bed and couch.\u00a0 She put her elbows on the table and leaned over her cappuccino, letting her hair fall over her face so the other patrons would not see that she was crying.<\/p>\n

A little later she crossed over to Sant\u2019Apollinare Nuovo.\u00a0 She always felt stirred by the glitter of the mosaics, the marble columns, the coffered ceiling and soffits of the arches. The basilica had been built at the beginning of the sixth century by an Ostragoth conqueror, Theodoric, as an Arian chapel for his palace.\u00a0 Some of the mosaics at one end of the nave had once depicted the king and his court.\u00a0 Fifty years later, when Theodoric was dead and Ravenna was under Byzantine rule, the church had been reconsecrated as a Catholic one, and the figures had been covered over with images of curtains.\u00a0 What had been Theodoric on this throne was now a gold design. There was only one visible indication of the change that had occurred: a hand from one of the original figures had been left.\u00a0\u00a0 Slim and white, the hand came out of the darkness between two curtains and rested against a column, barely noticeable from below unless you knew it was there.<\/p>\n

She gazed up at it until her neck hurt.\u00a0 She began to imagine a very still, silent, somehow living figure hidden behind the bright tiles, breathing quietly\u2014maybe a lady-in-waiting in a richly colored brocade gown.\u00a0 The figure would feel the light coming through the arched windows on the east side of the nave, hot on her open palm and the cuff of her sleeve.\u00a0 The rest of her would be achingly cold.\u00a0 She would have stood there year after year, enduring her own erasure.\u00a0 One day she might step forward and show herself.\u00a0 She might drift down through the hushed air, past the startled tourists, and step lightly onto the marble floor. Then she would walk out into the open courtyard, where a palace had once been, and feel the sun on her face again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her former husband was a good man, and she had screwed up the marriage. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3275,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3154\/revisions\/3275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}