You Were Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page B

could conceive of now would dominate his thoughts at that time, should that time come. Life presented a set of intractable problems that rose up and fell away in an unrelenting series, or maybe it was the same problem in different forms, or in the same form but seen differently as the organism first grew and then decayed. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours Karl had crested, and now joined those trudging down the slope into the valley of the dead.
    The suck of the sticky wooden floor on the bottoms of Sylvia’s flip-flops announced her arrival. She presented herself, hands on hips. The bare skin of her arms, neck, and face, sensing Karl’s gaze upon them, changed hue. The skin, he felt, after the clitoris, is the most sensitive organ of a woman’s body.
    “We’ve been given the kitchen,” she said.
    “In what sense?”
    “To clean.”
    “Why now, after all these years?”
    Her answer was to reverse the direction of the looking, so that now he felt his skin warm beneath the heat of her eyes.
    “You and me, hon, cleaning the kitchen.”
    “I’d like to nap first.”
    “You’ll nap when you’re dead.”
    “Maybe not.”
    They stood in the kitchen and assessed their task. The pathways of the blue linoleum floor most traveled by were least begrimed, but not by much. Papers, bread crumbs, scuff marks, and well-worn plant pulp had insinuated themselves into the lowest tier of the kitchen landscape. No surface, horizontal, vertical, or otherwise, was without its trace of hard and absentminded use. They looked at the sink and adjacent countertops and decided that the teetering mountain range of dishes, pots, and pans—coated with food and with what happens to food when let to sit in warm moist air for a month or more—would be their first task. They cleared away an area of floor, covered it with newspaper, moved things from the sink and placed them there. They hosed and scrubbed the sink and countertops. The muscles of his arms, neck, and back ached. She gave him aspirin and water of questionable provenance. They scoured and hosed, soaped and rinsed. Without speaking of it, they divided the tasks and agreed upon a high standard of cleanliness, nothing less than which would justify the difficulty and grossness of what they were doing. The pile diminished slowly therefore. They had created a wide swath of countertop on which things could be dried by the air, but they hadn’t yet cleared a place for them to be stored, and a quick opening and closing of cabinet doors had revealed that this, too, would be a task requiring considerable time, energy, and thought. The orderly distribution of objects in a home had long troubled Karl; it had been done wrong in all the homes he’d visited, not to speak of the highly problematic one he lived in. He himself had never been in charge of this unavoidable feature of domestic life, and the possibility of undertaking it with Sylvia Vetch exhilarated him. In inventing a new design for object positioning, and therefore also for the way bodies move through homes, they would remake the very concept of home , and remake the possibilities for boy-girl contact and connection. It was possible, it was possible to become someone new in this way, not just new to oneself but new to the world, to bring into the human sphere feelings that had not existed before, made from scratch with care by two gentle souls who admired each other and had similar values, though not, of course, identical values, because it was in the happy friction of values that the serious pleasure of relationship was felt and new things were created.
    As they journeyed deeper into work, sweat soaked his skin, hair, and clothes. His fragrance, fluid added, ripened and intensified. His pains had eased off and were now joined in his body by the spirit of work. Sylvia did not in any way that he could detect express her dislike of his smell, if she felt one. And if she herself was the source of any smells they were masked by