Paul Theroux: Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

“Sunny.” Her name was Sonia.

She sat down in the antique Savonarola-style chair, in the same knees-together posture, as she had done many times, but this was perhaps the last time — not perhaps. It was all at an end, a true breakup. No more wifehood for her — she’d probably never remarry and forfeit the alimony. He smiled thinking of his rich pretense of complaining about money, knowing in his heart that money never mattered, because there was always money; but such a vase as this was, even as the philistines guessed, one of a kind. It was promised to Sonia, and yet he could not see beyond the finality of this handover to any future for himself.

She hadn’t been a trophy wife: he had loved her, she had been part of his great luck and his achievement, and he had educated her in appreciating his vast art collection. Now she knew what a Scythian chariot finial was, and she knew why this Ming vase was precious for its copper-red underglaze, so fragile and yet unmarked. Knowing his collection this well, she was the only person who truly knew him.

“I can’t stay long.”

Saying this, still looking at the vase, it seemed that she had moved on, and she had the unimpressed body-snatched look of a woman who was perhaps newly involved with another man.

“I understand. I’ve got things to do. I’m still in business, in spite of what’s happening.” Not until he spoke did he realize he was resentful. He went on, “You expected to see me ruined?” She wasn’t listening. So he said, “I hate these people who are complaining about the economy. They created the downturn. I did too. That’s why I saw it coming. Only a fool thinks it’s straight north forever. I’d love to find a way to show them how foolish they’ve been.” She didn’t react. He leaned toward her. “It wasn’t straight north with us. It’s south now.”

Her eyes were dark and unperforated.

He said, “So here it is.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Thanks.”

She meant, Thanks for agreeing to give it to me — because she knew its value. It had symbolized that long-ago trip, the best phase of their marriage, as well as the taste that she had acquired from him and her insight into his personality.

But she didn’t know that he had already surrendered it, that he was merely going through the motions. He didn’t care about it anymore. He was surprised that she had agreed to this meeting, which was trouble for her, since she’d gotten the Connecticut house in the settlement, but had put it up for sale and now lived elsewhere — she refused to give him her address. Yet the thought of her being inconvenienced gave him some satisfaction.

“I know just what I’m going to do with it. I have the perfect place for it.”

This annoyed him. It meant that she had a house or an apartment that she loved — a shelf in that place, perhaps someone to admire it with her. I found it in Shanghai when China was just opening up. He resented her certainty, the way it seemed to represent a part of her future that she’d already begun to live without him. He was wrong about her seeming to be weakened after an illness; she was strengthened in her recovery.

“I’ve got the old box for you to carry it in.” He tapped the lid.

The pale cedar box was still crusted with the red wax seal from the antiques dealer in Shanghai, the folded export permit, a tissue-flimsy certificate, marked with chops and stiff at one corner with glued-on stamps. The box was as venerable as the vase, though Sonia didn’t seem to think so. It held as many memories, perhaps more, for being unregarded, plainer, and more durable.

All this time he had been sitting behind the great carved dining table that was his desk, talking across his blotter as if to an employee. He got up and walked to the front of it, avoiding Sonia’s side, circling, so that he stood apart, facing the vase.

“If you’re pressed for time — you’ve a place for it, huh? — you might as well take it away.”

He leaned, reached, and lifted it, then turned to her. Startled by his sudden offer, she raised both her hands to receive it, a mother’s gesture, to bring it to her body and cradle it like a baby. With a sudden warp of nausea in his throat he let it drop, and before she could grasp it, it plunged in a blurred column of its own pale light. As it smashed, she clawed the empty air with feral fingers and a second later put her futile hands to her face.

“Sorry,” he said softly, the word no more than a breath in the aftermath of the smash.

She let out a sharp cry, as though she’d seen a precious creature die. Even in the worst moments of their marriage he had never seen that look of loss on her face, an expression of pain amounting to agony. But the exaggerated expression seemed comic, as terror sometimes does to a bystander. He surprised himself by laughing — and because it was involuntary, like the reaction to a wisecrack, it was full-throated, a great guffaw, a joyous snort-honk of gusto that was like a sound of health.

Hearing him she began to cry, bobbing her head with sobs, and when he stepped nearer to comfort her, he lowered his foot onto the broken pieces, rocking his shoe, grinding them smaller, like a big jaw masticating nuts. Any hope that the fragments could be glued back together ended with the heavy molar-crunch of that footfall.

She did not say another word. When she left — he could see in her posture, in her shoulders, the angle of her neck and head — she was a different and defeated woman.

He said sorry again, and it was like the eloquence of the richest satire. The exhilaration was still rattling in his throat. He had not thought he was capable of such an elaborate undoing of the ritual. He shouted again across his office as the door shut: “Sorry!”

“An accident,” he murmured after she’d gone. But was it? People said, There are no accidents. They would have added, It was an unconscious wish to break the vase and upset Sonia.

And she had been — devastated. He had not realized how passionately she must have craved it until the thing broke and her face fell, until she left the office, moving stiffly, wounded, her posture altered, one shoulder higher than the other. She would not have looked more punished if he had physically assaulted her, beaten her head against a wall. Yet — for the sake of melodrama, he lifted his hands in a slow sacramental way — he had not laid a finger on her.

It was one thing to withhold an irreplaceable piece, or to sell it; it was another thing entirely to destroy it. Fascinated to think that the vase — such a live presence moments ago — no longer existed, he felt a thrill that very nearly undid the ache of incompleteness he’d sensed in himself that morning, the vase on his desk, knowing that Sonia was on her way. In the past, the nearest he’d come to this feeling was in a casino, stacks of chips piled in front of him, the roulette wheel spinning, Sonia round-shouldered behind him, horrified that he might lose it all. But he hadn’t cared — he was giddy at the prospect of losing. The thrill was visceral, an access of strength, a physical lift, an intimation of perverse power that drained from him when he won. In defiance, he put all his winnings on one number, and he was so exultant when he lost that he could recall each witnessing slack-jawed face at the table.

The memory of Sonia and the vase was most of all a memory of her fear: how scared she looked, wild-eyed in terror as the thing fell, and not just by the shattering of the vase, but by his laughter — the insult of it — and she had hurried away as though from a murderer. The act undid everything she knew about him; it made him a stranger to her. He was well aware of being self-taught and inarticulate, yet this smash showed virtuosity.