The Mermaid Chair Read Online Free PDF Page B

captured me back in the beginning.
    I leaned forward onto the bar, the speckled granite cold on the bones of my elbows, remembering how we’d met, needing to remember how it once was. How we were.
    He had showed up at my first so-called art exhibit, which had taken place in a ratty booth I’d rented at the Decatur Flea Market. I’d just graduated from Agnes Scott with a degree in art and inflated ideas about selling my work, becoming a bona fide artist. No one, however, had really looked at my art boxes all day, except for a woman who kept referring to them as “shadow-boxes.”
    Hugh, in the second year of his psychiatric residency at Emory, came to the flea market that day for vegetables. As he wandered by my booth, his eyes lit on my “Kissing Geese” box. It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.
    I’d painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene—English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps—then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.
    I’d been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who’d been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they’d been given a “room” together.
    The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I’d attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who’d seen the box had actually squeezed the horn. I’d imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.
    Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.
    â€œHow much do you want for it?” he asked.
    I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.
    â€œWould forty be enough?” he said, reaching for his wallet.
    I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.
    â€œFifty?” he said.
    I kept my face straight. “Okay, fifty.”
    We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the “Kissing Geese” box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.
    He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really had said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things: We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races? We’d spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.
    People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.
    Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh’s jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee’s baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she’d done on his prescription pad. There was his father’s Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather’s pocket-watch, the four pairs of cuff links I’d bought him for various