The Wilderness Read Online Free PDF

salmon fillets while oblongs of sunlight fell in on her hands.
    “They're old.” She put the knife down and spread her fingers. “Are they really my hands?”
    He stood by her side, picked up the knife, and folded her fingers around the handle. He kissed her neck, a neutral and warm contact but nothing more, and she tucked her hair behind her ear.
    In response to these worries that she was getting old there was nothing more to say; he had said it all. You're beautiful, he had previously ventured (and meant it, she was more beautiful now, in the details, in the stories of the lines, than before). She had shaken her head and simply disagreed. We all getold, he had tried: to no avail. Me faster than most, she had replied. He had shaken his head, she had shaken hers back. Once or twice he had offered, Helen, you're not getting old, and they had ended up smiling ruefully at the whiteness of the lie.
    “It's like being injured,” she said, and rested the knife blade on the salmon. “Suddenly I feel injured by the years, like I've been in a car crash.”
    “What is this, Helen? You have to stop. You're fifty-three, it's not old.”
    “I had a dream that you were leaning over a very beautiful Bible, here at the table. What does this mean, Jake?” She cut through the flesh once and then again. “That you're going to find God?” She laughed. “At last, you're going to find God! And why would you do that?”
    The expression she turned to him was unbearably sweet. Disarmed, he shrugged at it.
    “I doubt I will, I'm not looking for him. The dream means something else, or nothing. It means you want me to find God. It means I need to, it means anything, nothing.”
    She merely shook her head at him.
    “I think it means, Jake, that I am not going to be here for very long. You'll be alone—you see, God finds those who are alone and in need.”
    “And where are you going?” he asked, feeling querulous. He turned to take a plum from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and Helen stole it from his hand as he was about to bite it. She sliced the plum in half and scooped out the stone, then passed half back to him.
    “Look at this,” she said with a sudden childlike smile, and laid the salmon and the plum side by side. “One is fruit, one isfish, but the flesh is so similar. This is where I see God, in these—in these consistencies between things.”
    Discarding his half of fruit on the table he took the knife from her and held it close to her face. He had not wanted half a plum, he had wanted a whole one; he had not wanted it cut neatly, de-stoned. Certainly he had not wanted to hear her prophesise her own death, and moreover he had not, at the point where he saw her prophesy play before his mind in a stilted and sickening delivery of images, wanted to talk about the artistry of God in lieu, yet again, of a real topic of conversation.
    “What is this, Helen? Didn't you once used to ask me about my day, and I yours?”
    Her eyes, either side of the blade, blinked rather calmly. “Yes, and you used to say, Do we have to talk about our days, Helen? It's so
superficial,
talking about days. Can we not just have a coffee and make love instead?”
    The asymmetry of her face, divided as it was by the steel blade, captivated him. He had always thought of her as perfectly ordered, prettily symmetrical, delicate and unsurprising. She was, at this moment at least, not. Not delicate—her fearlessness made her formidable. Not pretty—too formidable to be pretty. No symmetry—one ear, he now observed, was higher than the other, one eye slightly wider, one cheekbone more threaded with fine blood vessels.
    “Can we make love now?” he asked. He wanted to withdraw the knife, knowing the absurdity of it, but he did not want to restore her to the plainness of perfection quite so soon. He felt an urgent love for her; he thought, he had to admit, of Joy.
    “No, not now.” She blinked again and backed away the few inches to the sideboard,