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Analysis of a Valediction Susanne was Leon’s wife and Leon was an asshole—at least according to the former during the past hundred Sunday brunches at La Boulange with her friends who shared strikingly similar perceptions of their own husbands. Husbands and wives did not get along; children ran away from home (those who could not started punk bands); the town’s edges grew outward until they met other towns, and these tangent towns cross pollinated. Kids fell off bikes in cul-de-sacs, ignored. The universe was expanding, lungs were collapsing. The Hesslemann account took Leon to Frankfurt four times a year, during which time he instructed his assistant Anne to water his orchid “about once every three days,” as aptly conveyed in a bullet-pointed memo, increments estimated as Mondays and Thursdays per Anne’s reasonable math. Anne had a Masters in Public Speaking, but alas, it was money that talked. During lunch sitting at the bench, she cowers into a softened paperback flapped open like a dead bird. Susanne had given Leon the orchid as a kind of truce to a four month long argument re: finances. Of course, money’s allocation and logistical tendency is a metaphor for deeper things, and Susanne was left again with that metallic taste of Leon’s selfishness, cold as a knife and against her belly all these years and no less dull. Without going into the post-nuptial, let’s just say, quote, “Leon was an asshole.” Anne had a feeling this orchid represented the marriage, like some weird horticultural threat or ultimatum—a mark perhaps of Susanne’s passive-aggressiveness—for Leon, who was not a worrier, worried a lot about this orchid, its labia-like petals faking it every time a breeze came into Leon’s office. Susanne had conveyed, implicitly or not, that Leon’s preoccupation with his career precluded his capacity to nurture anything, and that this orchid would meet its symbolic death—which brings us to Anne that Monday afternoon sitting in her boss’s leather executive chair, looking across at the wilting thing, imagining the final two petals propeller down to the floor. It wasn’t fair, nor professional, how Anne was unwillingly wrapped up in their dying marriage. She had her own parents, a small war of their own. Every marriage is the genocide of I Do. As the plane landed in Frankfurt, still screeching at 180 mph, Leon was on his Blackberry checking his inbox, each subject line a rung in some hypothetical ladder which he was forever climbing. Susanne’s rung was an untitled message which read “your mother called,” followed by two dashes and her initials. Leon looked at the two dashes and imagined love in its place. Susanne took the 5:15 home. Sometimes she missed it and took the 5:35. These extra 20 minutes felt like forever, as they do to an infant whose first minutes are the longest minutes they’ll ever experience. Time was a lesser ratio of one’s life as one lived on. Whether this was redeeming or not had yet to be known. Susanne played Sudoku, filling empty boxes 1 through 9, enjoying how something so simple as counting could be so difficult. She wondered, for a second, if she had treated her marriage this way—pushing a broken man away to see if he’d come back fixed—then found a place for 7 and 8. Each time the subway doors opened, the flood of humanity moved around her like rivers never touching stone. In winter the early sun setting through the graffiti-etched windows leave dark lines on her face. As the penultimate petal began its descent, Anne worried about her job. She had mild OCD and suffered from “catastrophic thinking,” in which the irrational aggregate of terrible thoughts cause extreme anxiety and hopelessness. She once had to recite a poem as part of her degree. The reasons were vague, having something to do with “conveying cadence,” it itself a tongue twister. She lamented it for three weeks, scratching away at her arms, and finally picked John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” from a seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry anthology which had made its way to her bathroom somehow. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. Anne recited these last lines in front of her seminar with a clenched throat, every crevice of her small body slippery with sweat. Later on that evening, she read the poem to herself, for the first time actually reading it. “Yes, me too,” she thought. The cat jumped in her lap. The cat jumped in her lap. Anne was still thinking about the orchid. The catastrophic thinking kicked in. She imagined the following series of events: not being able to explain to Leon that death was a part of life; getting fired right when the rent was raised; not being able to find another job; having to move back home with her parents; regressing into her murky adolescence; eating silent family dinners under the blare of the TV; getting so lonely that she would sneak, just as she had done, out her bedroom window at night, around the hedge of cypresses her father had planted a long time ago, down Pine Hollow, along the barely lit path behind the houses where the fenced dogs go mad, over the dewy uneven baseball field, to the pavement with the United States map painted on it, to meet that boy at her old elementary school, where they would climb on the roof, lie down and kiss—she kissing so softly, hardly ever.
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