Milagros
I turn the headlights off and wait. I don’t know what for. An answer would be nice. A way somehow to stop thinking and dreaming and remembering how things used to be, how I was happy then, how we were happy then and didn’t even know it.
arie drinks whiskey on the rocks. She drinks instead of yelling, instead of arguing, instead of crying. She drinks instead of asking me to please, please come home early, to please call when I’ll be late, to please hold and touch and fuck her sweetly but only sometimes. She strips down to panties and a T-shirt and sits in the front-room window on nights especially lonely, her draining glass glowing amber in the streetlight.
This is how I find her when I come home to my darkened living room: my Marie silhouetted on the sill, her head resting against the pane and her breath fogging the frosty glass. She doesn’t look up when I shut the door.
It’s somehow chillier in here than it is outside.
“Marie,” I say, “it’s cold.” She takes a long drink from her glass and stretches before descending from her perch—her dark, long hair undone and her pale thighs cool and her lips full and shining and tinged blue even in the dark.
“Your dinner is in the kitchen,” she says, walking past me, and drains the last of her drink into her mouth before disappearing into the bedroom.
Eggplant Parmesan with roasted asparagus is on the counter, congealing in its juices under plastic wrap. Wedges of limes and oranges dance along the edge of the plate: the pattern she picked out when we moved into the apartment in the spring, the pattern I had told her again and again I hated. I was almost glad when I came home a few weeks ago to broken shards of limes and oranges littering our kitchen floor, until I found Marie in the bathroom picking tiny pieces of ceramic from the soles of her feet, her glass of whiskey teetering on the sink. She looked up at me.
“I haven’t painted anything lately,” she said.
This plate must be one of the survivors, though I didn’t know there were any. I scoop its contents into the trash.
I think Marie was on a vegetarian kick. The refrigerator is packed with rotting vegetables because neither of us eats much anymore. But the freezer has been restocked with frosty bottles of her Jim Beam soldiers, all lined up in a row. I push aside the slimy bag of cilantro for a beer.
I don’t bother taking my coat off as I sit down on the couch, staring at my distorted reflection in the darkened television screen. Marie loved this coat last winter when it was new, and when she licked snowflakes from my eyelashes and when I didn’t work so much. She’d stop me in the middle of the street to check her lipstick in its shiny silver buttons. Then she’d tighten the scarf around my neck and flip up the collar of my coat.
“Now you look like an undercover spy,” she’d say, “and all you need is an undercover hat.”
I didn’t come home in the middle of the night then, drowning as I am now in a whirlwind of paperwork. I came home at a decent hour, not to a dark apartment with a mere shadow of my Marie to greet me but to the balmy, stinging smell of turpentine and oil paints, and one of her latest works in progress propped on an easel in the living room. Those vibrant colors of nonsensical scenes welcomed me: her very essence captured on canvas. I never understood them, though. Like the hand with an eye embedded into its palm, pink soap bubbles clinging to the fingertips, or – I don’t know where she comes up with these things – the severed limbs hanging from a clothesline strung above a cityscape.
“Why aren’t they bleeding?” I had asked her. She laughed.
“They’re not real severed limbs: They’re milagros,” she said. “But, you know, like made real. In the painting.”
I stared at the canvas. The severed foot had pink polish on its toenails.
“Oh, just forget it.” She put her hands on her hips and began to walk away.
“But I love it!” I said and pulled her into me. “My little Kahlo, with your milagros and tortillas and burritos. Go back to Mexico, why don’t you?”
When I look at her paintings, I see Marie, and that is why I love them. And they were everywhere: hung up above the couch, above the television and opposite the bathroom mirror, but also propped up against the baseboards, spread out over the coffee table and leaning against couch cushions. They were always changing, always giving the apartment a different feel; always disappearing as she sold them but always replaced as she painted new ones. The paintings started dwindling, though; I don’t remember when I noticed exactly. All I know is there aren’t any around anymore, and the apartment feels empty without them.
