III. A Veil, Darkly

He looks so tired. I want to sweep my hand across his eyes, as people do for the dead in movies, gracefully lowering his lids with my palm to give him peace. But he is alive, and I am the one who is not.

It's a dinner, I gather, that keeps him up at night. A dinner for the ballet. He always was obsessive with his job, a right Diaghilev, though much kinder - no angry impresario, tapping his cane upon the floor to mark his displeasure. His is a more heartfelt lament, a downcast blue eye, a sigh of disappointment. The ballerinas stop their tapping at once and huddle, cooing like doves with concern for what they've done wrong, how can they improve, what has upset him so?

I hate them.

I've been, since birth, an envious sort. I would say unfortunately, but perhaps I should say ironically. These words have been so altered since their conception that I don't know anymore. They have tattooed their phonemes into something quite different, like reckless teenagers.

I have a reckless teenager. Had. With big red and black boots and an oilskin coat that he only wore when he wanted to be somebody else. Or when somebody else wanted to be him.

We named him Jonathon Alexander, after the photograph, but Leon was unaware of this, because he didn't even know about the photograph. Which is where the irony comes in, you might say, in regard to my jealous nature. He goes by Alex most these days, anyway, so my tribute has gone entirely unnoticed by anyone in the long run. Even when he embraced Jonathon, it was truncated to John, and from there to Jack. But something about Jack terrified him early on until Jack was an utterly different entity and Alex would have nothing to do with him.

The photograph, anyhow, was from an old book on anatomy I stole from my parents' bookshelf as a child. Funny to think how revelatory such a simple textbook could be at the tender age of twelve. The pictures weren't even in color, like they generally are now, nor was there a single snippet of bisected cadaver to add reality to the matter. Black and white diagrams every other page, and a load of what seemed gibberish everywhere else, in a font that would give a hawk eyestrain. Yet for a young girl devoid of physical knowledge, it was an epiphany in prose. Only those who have lived an utterly sheltered life know the profundity of learning the likes of epididymis and catching a thrill that runs from knee to stomach. I do not envy those who were raised otherwise. Their discoveries were far less interesting.

I suppose that is why I came to cherish the photo as much as I did. It was tucked into the gray endpapers of the book, held fast with a dot of glue between cardboard and paper, as though someone were keeping it safe from the tawdry implications of ovum and Fallopian, round words like biting through a single fragment of fresh caviar. Keeping it pure, perfect.

Which it was for the most part. Except for a little oblong water-stain in the lower right corner, exactly like a teardrop.

Other than the sepia stain, it was in black and white, the white still remarkably fresh, with only the faintest hint of yellow, about the color of an eggshell from the grocer's. The whites of his eyes a whipped albumen, the irises only a hint darker, still pale. His hair black and wavy, his nose Romanesque, his lips cruel.

He was exquisite.

On the back, written in spidery pencil (which seems so common on old photographs that you have to wonder if the spiders themselves really did put it there), was the name "Jonathon Alexander Pendule."

So, as I said, it seems a bit ironic or hypocritical or ultimately downright unfortunate that even as I was seething about Leon and his little troupe, I had only picked him to be my husband because he looked a bit like the man in the photograph. Whom I really loved. Because I had found him in the first book that really got me off.

It's like how every woman secretly loves the man she lost her virginity to. If she remembers his name, which I do, because I've never been with anyone other than Leon and Mr. Jonathon Alexander Pendule by extension. And Alex, too, though I'm not sure that counts.

It was a little shocking when Alex began to resemble him namesake even more than his father. Perhaps Jonathon Pendule had proved the ideal catalyst, or perhaps my own features were closer to his than I supposed, for I have heard that we are most attracted to those who resemble us but aren't related. Conditioning usually divides us from the latter. Though what if you've loved the look before the person was even born?

I can't say it justifies the things I did, late at night in Alex's room. I never meant it to go so far, but I married young and the instinct for experimentation hadn't left my system yet, I suppose.

That's where the "unfortunately" comes in.

I stopped when he was old enough to properly remember, though that was later than it should have been, and I suspect that had I carried on beyond that he still wouldn't have remembered. It was as though the goings-on in the night had nothing to do with the daytime Alex, two separate compartments in the same beautiful brain.

And then he began to behave as though a different young man lived in each of those two compartments, one for the dark and one for the light. I tousled his black curls and the Alex I bore would flinch without knowing why, but the boy in the oilskin would smirk slyly up as if to say, I know. You better not make me tell.

Leon, busy Leon, never once noticed, assumed it was a phase if he assumed anything at all.

So it was fitting that, walking back from the store one Saturday morning, I should glance up to see the man in the photograph staring at me from across the street (only perhaps it was my son, only I don't know, because it wasn't him anymore) and that I should take a silly step forward, not thinking, and walk directly into the path of the oncoming lorry.

He smiled when it hit me. His mouth was lovely.