The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Next (“The Cages”)

A Novella

Excerpt B

It was funny, she thought, that Evan, of all people, should worry about losing her. Funny that he should be so solicitous of her affection; as though she will one day declare that she has had enough of him and walk out in the middle of the half-sautéed mushrooms.  Or that she might just decide one day to not come home from work. 

Had five years really changed him so much?  Or was it her?

Five years ago she would have done almost anything to have him.  He should have been preposterous for her to contemplate. Entirely out of her league. More attractive by orders of magnitude than any man she had ever dated.  Smarter.  More successful.  More sensitive.  More attentive.  A nuptial virgin.

In a word, perfect.

Not just in some culturally generic sense—although her girl friends had been agog and disbelieving at even that basic level.  He was perfect for her.  For Maribel Lumm.  His arid humor. His shyness, like an underground stream, pooling beneath his daunting confidence. His love of nature. His progressive instinct. The sacred stacks of Blue Note vinyl.  The way he dipped into his late father’s collection of biographies when the air turned cool and the leaves started to flutter and fall with the first breath of autumn.  All of this quintessentially, magnetically, Evan; a walking contradistinction to the soullessness of the digital age to which he had sworn his professional allegiance.

He might have had any woman, for any woman would have had him.  And yet, he had allowed himself to be chosen by her.  By her—Maribel Lumm.  He had seen fit to reward her improbable persistence.  One date.  Then another.  Then another.  A dinner. A lunch.  An afternoon of kites in the park.  The hot air balloon.  Always her request; always his acquiescence. Saying yes.  Looking past everything in her that was not perfect. Allowing for substance. Allowing himself an open mind and inviting her inside. Inside of him, inside of them, where she had stayed, curled up like a cold stray by the warm fire. Cold because the world was what it was to a stray, scavenging for scraps of happiness. Warm because she would never again want for that which would make her content.

And yet, he acted as though he could not keep her; as though she was a wounded bird in a punctured shoebox healing her way to inevitable release. Did he think her affections, her loyalty, so impermanent that she might one day leave him for no reason?

No.  She knew him better than that.  He was as confident as ever.  He knew damn well she would never leave him.  It was all just Evan’s way.  She was another inestimable treasure in his life of charms; another rare value that he had secured and made his own.  Inside he was determined to keep her.  To not lose her.  His manner with her was all process, masking the arrogance of certainty in an uncertain world, ever careful not to offend the gods by any lack of ceremonial humility.  Was it such a price to pay – his gratitude, his solicitude, his deference – if it meant she would never leave him? If it meant the impossible stayed impossible?

It should have been an ideal state of affairs.