Diane Williams: Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

“You’re wearing that?” the wife said, when the man reemerged in Spandex fitness apparel.

“We found it in Two Dot! You don’t remember?” he said — fondly patting lightly his own chest. “It’s breathable. It’s stretchable.”

“I thought it was in Geraldine,” the wife said.

“But look here, maybe you should stay the night,” the new husband said. He offered seed cake and coffee — the mild and friendly kind — this time, to drink.

“What are you doing?” said the wife — for her husband’s hands were filled with the sugar bowl and the creamer and several cups were swinging from his fingers by their ears.

All so beautifully turned out, the dishes found the table’s surface safely. These were specimens of the most romantic china service. The gilding was very good — the glaze finely crazed. There were hand-painted sprays on an apple-green ground.

“I hope you are a comfort to her,” the man said, “and that you show good sense. Because this is what it is — doesn’t everybody have to take care of Tasha?” He did not refer to her sex behavior and instead spoke generally about the dell they had once lived in and lunged silently at his disappointment that he could no longer touch his former wife. He extolled the mountain town where the wife had often reflected that looking up and out, say, over at an elevated ridge — was to her advantage.

Now she resided in this flatter state in an apartment on the third floor across from the church — from where she could see its spire.

Her glance often ran recklessly toward it, as if spurting over a rim, or through a spout.

The chancel and the sanctuary had lately been under ugly scaffolding. A few years back, one of the two aisle rose windows had been carried away for restoration and had not been returned yet.

Fortunately, the inner-draw draperies of the couple’s window facing the church were made of cheerful chintz.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if I stayed,” the man said. “Well, sure, yes, absolutely, you bet!” he said. “I’m a little nervous.”

He prepared to eat by sitting down and stressing his jaws with a big smile.

His cheeks are elongated and hollow — his brow highly peaked. His face is not difficult to explain — it’s cathedral-like.

The new husband’s whole head has an unfinished look that promises to work out well. Whereas the wife’s furrowed face — some have said — shows heavy evidence of deception and is cause for alarm.

Right then, in front of them, the woman uncapped a tube of gel ointment and applied a dab of it under a long fingernail. Next she opened a cellophane packet from which she withdrew a cracker that produced plenty of crumbs.

The husband told the man, “Surely you’d be welcome to stay!”

As the wife mopped up her particles and the traces, she spoke somewhat rudely to the man and also to her husband.

“I went somewhere…” the man said, expanding on a point. Hadn’t he been molded to better express himself?

A small object’s overall smallness on a shelf caught his eye — a round-bodied jar of free-blown glass whose neck was straight, that had flat shoulders — a flask he would not get to smash! It was streaked with permanent crimson and cold black. It had about it the real suggestion of the softness of human flesh.

“Did you imagine me the way I am?” the man asked the new husband, who answered no.

“What do you mean?”

“But I am not against you,” the husband said.

“Say a little more.”

Sirens in the street produced a brief, headstrong fugue.

“Say a little more,” said the man.

The husband got up from his chair. Why should anyone be fearful of his certain combinations of words, narrowly spaced?

The husband gave himself ample time to speak.

No gross vices were explored. His is not the voice of a man in the pulpit. No personal impulses were defined or analyzed.

He did deliver a slovenly interrogatory.

He went uphill, downhill with—“Wah-aaaaaaaat waaahz it ligh-ike, with herrrrrrrrr-rah, for you-ooooooo—?”

That’s all that he was saying.

Nothing seemed to want to end it.

Beneath his coat, when I first met him, his shirt had seemed to have broken out into an inflammation — into a lavish plaid or a strong enough checkered pattern.

There was the stretch of time when my future materialized on account of Dan.

We fried things on the stove top and made coffee. Formerly, I had been disabled and chilled, the usual story — so then the hamburgers had become fun.

Dan was doing the job of keeping us together and he was creating a little garden at the back of the house and the garden was extending onto the beach and the garden didn’t have any grass to speak of, but we had this vision of growing things there. There was a daisy we were trying to grow. There was another flower that looked like an artichoke, but it was not only to be a garden of landscape plantings. It was supposed to be equal to our worth.

One day when we were out in the garden, a dog that had been chasing a rabbit came up to us. Dan said hello and we kept that dog. It was a tan dog and it was a mix of the best available species and the dog was trembling. He had that look in his eyes. He had the heart to do any work that was necessary, but we had nothing for him to do. And I was struck by how the dog was featuring so prominently. For instance, we might think to go someplace, but would the dog like it?

The dog had his leisure hours and Dan and I had been together longer than I expected and I was all tired out because we had indulged ourselves in every desire.

Although, occasionally, we still had a lustrous sunny day with lots of time in it, more than usual.

These days, when we tie up the dog in the yard we can barely bend to weed.

The weeds and the dead flowers — clumps — are like the stacks of our used dishes with the dribs of jelly and bite-marked bread crusts that are hardly ever put away.

So how much more describing is necessary to assess if we’re done expecting something even more fortunate to turn up?

I was stepping into a corridor. It was empty except for Dan. He moved backward awkwardly, but then his face rose toward me like a steel magnet and it landed on my face with a bump. He has an enormous head and pale-pigmented skin.

I ran into him again later.

And then there was a long, long time without my seeing another human being.

And after the last years were over, we were dead.

The mother had fought a small cause to prevent the little girl from sticking her hand into the pond to try to catch a fish, but the child fell in and went under. Which of them did the wrong thing?

The father wrapped his hands around the crying child’s neck as he lifted her up and out and the mother shook droplets from the wetted front of her own skirt.

A rose of Sharon — like an old Chinese, hand-painted lacquer screen — obscured the sight of anything more of them, as the group left. But the mother, I could hear her saying—“The what? I will not!”

But to get back to the pond! — we were at the Burnett Fountain in the Conservatory Garden where a bronze boy toots on a flute at the feet of a bronze girl who holds her overflowing bowl high.

Legs together — the boy reclines in a mermaid pose — and people in other mermaid poses had been taking turns being photographed on the stone pavers at the edge of the reflecting pool that was filled with the blue lilies and the fish.

I also lowered myself so that I was elongated and bent at the waist.

I watched a creamy madcap one ploughing among the others that were, most of them, too good to be true.