Where I'm Calling From

separations and the short periods of time I was away on business or in the hospital, etc.—I would estimate, as I say, that I received seventeen hundred or possibly eighteen hundred and fifty handwritten letters from her, not to mention hundreds, maybe thousands, more informal notes (“On your way home, please pick up dry cleaning, and some spinach pasta from Corti Bros”). I could recognize her handwriting anywhere in the world. Give me a few words. I’m confident that if I were in Jaffa, or Marrakech, and picked up a note in the marketplace, I would recognize it if it was my wife’s handwriting. A word, even. Take this word “talked,” for instance. That simply isn’t the way she’d write “talked”! Yet I’m the first to admit I don’t know whose handwriting it is if it isn’t hers.
    Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never.
    I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I suppose, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.
    I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven’t read it through in its entirety, and won’t, since I can’t find it now), is utterly false. I don’t mean false in the sense of “untrue,” necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don’t want to quibble. I don’t want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No. What I want to say, all I want to say, is that while the sentiments expressed in the letter may be my wife’s, may even hold some truth—be legitimate, so to speak—the force of the accusations leveled against me is diminished, if not entirely undermined, even discredited, because she did not in fact write the letter. Or, if she did write it, then discredited by the fact that she didn’t write it in her own handwriting! Such evasion is what makes men hunger for facts. As always, there are some.
    On the evening in question, we ate dinner rather silently but not unpleasantly, as was our custom. From time to time I looked up and smiled across the table as a way of showing my gratitude for the delicious meal—poached salmon, fresh asparagus, rice pilaf with almonds. The radio played softly in the other room; it was a little suite by Poulenc that I’d first heard on a digital recording five years before in an apartment on Van Ness, in San Francisco, during a thunderstorm.
    When we’d finished eating, and after we’d had our coffee and dessert, my wife said something that startled me. “Are you planning to be in your room this evening?” she said.
    “I am,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”
    “I simply wanted to know.” She picked up her cup and drank some coffee. But she avoided looking at me, even though I tried to catch her eye.
    Are you planning to be in your room this evening? Such a question was altogether out of character for her. I wonder now why on earth I didn’t pursue this at the time. She knows my habits, if anyone does. But I think her mind was made up even then. I think she was concealing something even as she spoke.
    “Of course I’ll be in my room this evening,” I repeated, perhaps a trifle impatiently. She didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. I drank the last of my coffee and cleared my throat.
    She glanced up and held my eyes a moment. Then she nodded, as if we had agreed on something. (But we hadn’t, of course.) She got up and began to clear the table.
    I felt as if dinner had somehow ended on an unsatisfactory note. Something else—a few words maybe-was needed to round things off and put the situation right again.
    “There’s a fog coming in,” I said.
    “Is there? I hadn’t noticed,” she said.
    She wiped away a place on the window over the sink with a dish towel and looked out. For a minute she didn’t say anything. Then she said— again mysteriously, or so it seems to me now—”There is. Yes, it’s very foggy. It’s a heavy fog, isn’t it?” That’s all she said. Then she lowered her eyes and began to wash the dishes.
    I sat at the table a while longer before I said, “I think