Richard never knew why it happened, or how, but, in the end, he thought he understood what it meant. And perhaps that, at the very end, was enough.
The screaming was over. The completely inarticulate fits of obscenities they'd both descended to when they'd run out of real words were gone too, passed like a sudden summer storm.
He felt merely drained. He stood alone in the living room, listening to the ticking of the clock on the mantel, and, beyond that, to the silence of their disheveled apartment. When at last he made his way to the bedroom, he found, much to his surprise, that his wife had left the door unlocked.
He turned the handle slowly.
"Karen?"
The bedroom was dark.
"Karen?"
She muttered something he could not make out, a single word like a profound sigh.
"What?"
She did not answer.
His only thought had been to slip through the bedroom into the bathroom, then come out again and retrieve his pajamas and a blanket from the closet so he could spend what would very probably be his last night in this apartment on the sofa.
But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that she had rolled over to one side of the bed, the way she always did. When he was ready, he got into bed beside her, more out of habit than any hope or conviction.
The bedsprings creaked. If he listened very hard, he could still hear the clock over the mantel in the living room.
Karen muttered something again. She was talking in her sleep. It was just like her, it seemed to him then, just like the self-absorbed, overgrown child she had become, or perhaps had always been, to go straight to bed after the domestic war to end all wars and sleep it off like a Saturday night's drunk.
He lay still for a while beside her, staring at the ceiling, his hands joined behind his head.
It was beyond apology now, beyond grovelling, beyond absurd bunches of roses with absurd cards. Everything was decided, and there was some relief in that, a release from all doubt and tension. It was over. They were getting divorced as soon as possible.
That was a simple fact he could cling to.
But the fact didn't seem so simple as he lay there. He spent a long, masochistic time rehearsing their early years together in his mind, not dwelling so much on her, but on how he had felt, the sensation, the satisfaction of being perfectly in love for just one, perfect day. There had been one perfect day, he somehow knew, and everything had declined subtly from it. Yet he couldn't find the day in his memory, for all he was sure there had been "one, brief, shining moment," as the phrase went, and he wept softly for the loss of it.
Then he turned angrily on his side, his back to Karen, his fists tight against his chest, and he cursed himself for the sort of fool who would go back for punishment again and again and never learn.
He listened to the clock ticking, and to Karen breathing. Once again she babbled something in her sleep. It seemed to be a single word over and over. He still couldn't make it out.
Perhaps he slept briefly. He was aware of some transition, a vague disorientation, as if a few minutes had been clipped from the film-strip of his life. Still he lay in the darkness on the bed, his back to Karen.
He couldn't hear the clock. There was only the silent darkness holding him like a fly suspended in amber.
And a word. He felt it forming on his own lips, and he had to speak it aloud just to know what it was.
"Soft," he said.
What followed was temptation. Part of his mind laughed bitterly and remembered the old Oscar Wilde jibe about the only way to deal with temptation being to give in to it. Part of his mind watched, a disinterested observer, as his body turned toward Karen, as his lips said again, almost soundlessly, "Soft."
She was wearing a sleeveless nightgown. The same compulsion that made him turn, that made him speak, now caused him to reach up, ever so gently, and touch her bare shoulder.
"Soft," he said. He squeezed, and his detached puzzlement grew as he felt that her shoulder was indeed soft, like warm, living clay. His fingers left a deep, firm impression in her flesh, as if she were a clay figure and he had just ruined the sculptor's work.
He ran his fingers into the grooves and out again, confirming what he felt.
Then he drew his hand back quickly and lay still, afraid, his heart racing. He stared at the dark shape of his wife on the bed beside him. He thought he could make out just a hint of the disfigurement.
It was impossible, of course, but he couldn't bring himself to tell himself that, to say aloud, or firmly in his own mind, You must be dreaming. People do not turn into silly-putty, not in real life.
Part of him wanted to believe.
The word came to him once more. The urge to reach out to her followed, like a child's uncontrollable desire to pick at a scab, to touch a sore.
"Soft," he said, kneading the whole length of her arm like dough. She didn't seem to feel any pain. Her breathing remained the same regular in-out of deep sleep.
Again she mumbled something, her breath passing through flapping lips almost as if she were trying to imitate a horse.
He touched her. He felt the warm flesh passing between his fingers, never breaking off the way clay would, but losing all shape as he squeezed again and again. He felt the hard joint of her elbow for only a second before it too became flaccid, endlessly plastic.
"Soft," he said, and with horrified fascination he stretched her arm until it reached down past her ankle, then flattened it until it was like the deflated arm of a balloon figure. That was what she was, he decided, an inflato-girl ordered from the back pages of a men's magazine. That was what she deserved to be, he told himself, and his anger suddenly returned. He knelt over her now, astride her, and he touched her flesh again and again, smearing her face out on the pillowcase, crushing her other shoulder, while he thought how much he hated her and could not find the words until he arrived at Poe's perfect phrase, the thousand injuries of Fortunato.
"Yes," he whispered as he pressed her, as her flesh flowed and changed and spread across the covers. "Yes. Fortunate. Soft, Fortunato. Soft."
And finally, reaching into the ruin of her chest, pushing his hands under the layers of flesh as he might under a heap of old clothes, he held her beating heart between his fingers.
Still she breathed gently, her distended, lumpy body rising and falling as if someone were making a feeble attempt to inflate the inflato-girl.
Then his anger passed, and once again he wept, and lay motionless on the bed, atop her, beside her, her flesh all around him, her steady breathing caressing every part of him. He felt himself becoming sexually aroused, and he was afraid and ashamed.
He listened to the silence of the apartment where he was spending his last night and wondered what precisely he should do. He laughed aloud, bitterly, at the prospect of going into the street now, at whatever late hour it was, approaching a policeman and saying, "Er, excuse me officer, but I've squeezed my wife a little too hard and—"
He imagined the expressions on the faces of the nurses at the hospital emergency room as he brought Karen in draped over himself like a poncho, her face and hands dangling down by the floor.
Her breathing caressed him and he said again and again, "Soft. Soft. For you, my dearest Fortunato, soft forever."
Once more he wept, then laughed aloud hysterically, then hushed himself in sudden, desperate dread, terribly afraid that he might wake her.
He lay paralyzed, and swiftly, without the slightest effort on his part, the memory he had been searching for came to him, and he remembered that day ten years ago when they were both twenty-three, about six months before they were married, when he took her on a picnic to some scenic spot up the Hudson, near Tarrytown perhaps, where the towers of Manhattan were like grey shapes of cloud just around a bend in the river.
Nothing much happened, but he remembered lying beside her on the blanket in the warm sun, gently stroking her hair while an orange and brown butterfly flapped around their faces and neither one of them bothered to brush it away.
It was a moment of perfect harmony, perfect agreement, and their futures seemed so certain. It was a relief, a release from all doubt and tension.
She had risen on her elbow, holding her chin in her hand, and smiled down at him.
"I love you," she said. "When they made you, they broke the mold."
"You too," he said.
He awoke with a feeling like a sudden drop, as if he'd stepped off a cliff in a dream.
It was dawn. By the first grey light seeping through the Venetian blinds he could make out the dresser against the far wall and the bathroom door hanging open.
Something stirred on the bed, touching him from many directions at once, caressing him.
He closed his eyes desperately, and groped about in this self-imposed, utter darkness, weeping again, sobbing, "Soft, soft, damn it, one more time, please," as he tried to gather her flesh together, to shape it, to reassembled the ruined form into some semblance of the original.
But he was no sculptor.
By full light of day he had to, at last, open his eyes and behold his attempt.
He screamed.
She opened her eyes.
He felt her flesh closing over his hand, his fingers giving way, mingling with hers.
She spoke out of a gaping wound that might have once been a mouth.
"Soft," she said.