Walter’s death at the tail end of New York’s Indian summer had been only a matter of time. For Melissa, the russet leaves falling from the maple tree outside her apartment had been her calendar these last few weeks, as she counted down the days.
She had taken compassionate leave to care for her husband. Watching him slowly fade away in synchrony with the foliage on the tree, she did as best she could. She knew the day was nigh. And yet the abruptness of the void when it came was still a massive shock. It was only when he was no longer there that she fully grasped what absence meant.
Melissa and Walter had met a good forty years ago at a gallery on the King’s Road in Chelsea, London. They bonded over the sensual curves of a sculpture by an artist unknown to both of them. Melissa had only recently graduated in English and American literature and was still considering her career options. On the other side of the artwork stood a tall stranger with an impressive head of thick auburn hair peering over the top of his gold rim glasses.
‘Should I buy it?’ he said with a challenging smile. ‘If he makes a name for himself, I could enjoy a comfortable retirement in a few years.’
This suave American professor of anthropology with a taste for art and a teasing twinkle in his eye swept Melissa off her feet from the word go. Almost literally. For within two weeks, he had carried her off to New York, and three months later they were married. Her only condition was that they live in Chelsea, Manhattan, to help keep up the pretence that she had never left the London that she loved.
Walter – no less smitten by this young Englishwoman than Melissa was by him – duly bought the apartment she requested. But the unknown sculptor never did make it big. And Walter never retired.
The funeral was well attended. Friends and family from around the world came to pay their respects. It seemed as if the whole global community had come to share her grief. But she knew it was an illusion. No one could possibly share her pain. And when her sister-in-law offered to stay over for a few days, Melissa insisted that she preferred to be alone. To remember Walter and their time together undiluted by outsiders.
It was not until the next day, a Sunday, that the true enormity of the gap in her life struck home. An absence without end. It cut deep inside her with a steely coldness, and left her now aching and empty.
Melissa had been woken by the sunlight glinting through the curtains. It had been a sleepless night, and she was late. Normally she would be up by now, breakfast done and her makeup perfected for the day ahead. The smell of coffee should be lingering in the air. Walter would always make a pot and take a cup to his study. He would have long been up and at his desk by now, she told herself, even fancied that she could hear the sound of tapping on his keyboard. Then cursed her stupidity.
Late though she was on this day, Melissa kept to her routine. Made herself a cup of tea and enjoyed a breakfast of toast and Marmite - a treat she had been pleasantly surprised to find in her local Safeway only recently. Yet today it lacked any flavour at all.
Breakfast done, she then attended to her makeup. Even if Walter was not with her today, she told herself that he would likely be watching at that very moment. Unlike many of his peers, he liked to see a woman in makeup, and she would not want to let him down. Besides, it always made her feel good if she looked presentable.
Once the makeup ritual was complete, she made herself another cup of tea, carried it into the lounge and set it down on the coffee table before lowering herself onto the sofa. Seated there, cup in hand, she sipped cautiously on the tea. A tear ran down her cheek and dropped into the cup. She gazed at the tree outside the apartment window, its once russet leaves now washed out, drained of any colour. How they fell, waving in the breeze as if to bid her farewell before they fluttered to the ground. In their hypnotic downward drift, her mind went as blank as the void in her life.
It was the calendar effect of the vanishing foliage which slowly filled that void. And as the last leaf fell, she remembered that it was two years ago to the day when Walter received his diagnosis. Late October. They sat together in Hudson River Park contemplating journey’s end.
‘We who were living are now dying,’ Walter said, as they watched a ferry boat depart the pier for its own landing place.
She recognized the words at once. They came from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, which she had given him for their very first Christmas together.
‘…with a little patience,’ he added, completing Eliot’s line with an inscrutable smile and a kiss on Melissa’s cheek.
It was as if his gravelly voice was in the room with her at that moment. A shudder ran through her at the memory of those words: with a little patience. Then the shiver gave way to a smile. Walter had often teased her about the times she loved to spend with a pack of cards playing patience.
‘We call it solitaire where I hail from,’ he would say, taunting her in a way that would always end up in joyful banter over the cultural divide between them.
One of her most treasured belongings was the pack of Versailles playing cards he had bought for her at a flea market in Paris on their silver wedding anniversary. Melissa welled up at the memory and, fighting back the tears, began to rummage through an old sideboard from Asia that had been in Walter’s possession even before they met.
She raked through the drawer with the fastidious care of a nesting bird until she found what she was after. Returning to the sofa with the cherished pack of cards, she sat at the coffee table, shuffled the pack and laid out the cards to play clock patience. It seemed a fitting choice. She valued the game for its simplicity. It allowed her both to free her mind and to concentrate at the same time. Yet she had never in her entire life succeeded in beating the cards.
‘That’s just the way they fall,’ Walter would say when she cursed under her breath and tossed the last king into the midst of the remaining unturned cards. So she would try again.
But her frustration today came not from the patience, but from her dismay when she found the pack was one card short.
‘Damn,’ she said, and spent the best part of an hour hunting high and low for the missing card until she was forced to admit defeat. Still cursing under her breath, she returned the incomplete pack to the sideboard and went to make another cup of tea.
It was a week or so later, as Melissa was slowly getting used to life on her own, that she resolved at last to go out into the world. After clearing the breakfast and perfecting her makeup, she applied equally meticulous care to making up the bed. Once the quilted satin cover was neat and tidy, and any hint of a crease in its royal blue glory had been smoothed away, she ventured out.
The sky was overcast. The trees now almost entirely stripped of their foliage by a storm that had swept over the city the day before. The boats no longer ploughed the water with the same look of contentment that she had witnessed with Walter. Winter was already beckoning.
Melissa took herself to the same bench in the same corner of the Hudson River Park where Walter had quoted from The Waste Land on the day of his diagnosis. The memory of his words plunged her now into a dark abyss.
She would have done better to seek out the shared memories of the Whitney Museum. Or the cosy warmth of Yanni’s for a cappuccino. That cold bench in the park was the worst possible choice she could have made.
Melissa took a tissue from her old Moschino sling bag, discreetly mopped her eyes and headed back to the apartment.
An ineffable fragrance of welcome hung in the hallway as she entered, as if to say what a fool she had been to imagine she was ready for the outside world, that it was so much warmer here. She caressed the sensual sculpture from Chelsea, London, which still stood by the hall stand after all these years, hung up her coat and removed her shoes. Worn out already by her brief excursion in the fresh air, she took herself to the bedroom for a lie down and a quiet moment of contemplation.
Opening the door into the bedroom, she gasped at the sight that greeted her. It took her breath away. For there, face up in the middle of the bed on the pristine royal blue of the quilted cover, lay the missing card.
The two of hearts.
A shiver coursed through her veins. She looked about the room, wary of every shadow, every nook and cranny. Then she smiled.
‘Oh Walter,’ Melissa whispered, as she took the card in her hands, clutched the two of hearts to her chest and curled up on the bed.
about the author
A native of Devon, now landlocked in Switzerland, J. Edwin Skinner writes occasional short stories in between longer projects, e.g. middle-grade fantasies and, under the pen name A.B. Decker, mystery/thrillers, two of which have been published and a third is currently in search of a publisher. ;
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