By Jade Campbell
I did not know him but I liked the way he could make himself cry. I felt I knew him when he did, and that he knew me too.
He played the role of a wronged husband. At a small table in the dim light, the woman pretending to be his wife admitted to sleeping with another man and something inside of him curled up like a hurt animal on a roadside alone. I saw it happen. As she told him what she had done, his body tensed against the injury and I thought about how, if my hand had been there, pressed flat against his stomach, I would have felt his muscles tighten.
She had been away somewhere, I don’t remember where, and he had made her a homecoming cake. It was white, with sprinkles, and it sat between them in the middle of the table. They spoke over it and its presence there was tragic.
“What did I do wrong? What did I do?” he asked her and then the audience. He had a plaintive look and I wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and press my lips against his ear.
The theatre was small and I had never been before. I was still uncertain of the wideness of this city and the way it seemed so full of people that I worried they would rub against me on the street. I had expected it to be quieter, less crowded. The reality made me jumpy, but I remembered what my mother had said about not hiding like a little rabbit in a hole. So I had gone to the theatre.
“It wasn’t your fault,” the woman said, but he didn’t believe her. He stood and walked slowly around the table like a creature, caged. I watched him and I noticed, suddenly, that he had a limp. It was so subtle that it could not be pretended. He walked like a person without a limp, but still, I could see it. He was trying to conceal it, I realised, and I leaned forward in my chair. I could feel my heart. The limp was not a part of his character; it was him, and I had seen it. I looked hard at him. I wanted him to look at me.
He paused behind his chair. His fingers gripped the wooden slat and traced the patterns of the grain unconsciously. He looked at his wife, and then down at his hands, and then pulled out the chair to sit.
“Julie…” He spoke softly, reaching out his hand across the table to her. She would not look at him or take his hand. “Julie, please.”
For a long moment, he stayed there, hand outstretched. His stomach was pressed against the table’s edge where he leaned towards her. I thought about how I would like to put my hand between him and the table, to soften the pressure there and feel the movement of his breathing.
When Julie stood he looked up at her like a child. He watched her leave and then lowered his head to the table quietly. With one cheek pressed against the wood, his face was distorted, and he closed his eyes and began to cry. A tear rolled slowly over the bridge of his nose and dripped to the table. Others slid down the valley of his cheek and onto his lips and into his mouth. I thought about how he could taste them, right at that moment. It didn’t matter if he was acting; there were tears in his mouth. The thought of it gave me goosebumps.
The audience was silent. Somewhere offstage, the girl who had been Julie was undressing. I watched his face and I wondered if he had ever kissed her, or wrapped his arms around her after a show. I wondered who had put that powder on his face, and who had tied his tie in that sad way, and I felt a painful lurching in my chest.
But then he opened his eyes and looked at me. They were red and they were the saddest thing I had ever seen and I knew at once that he was looking at me from beneath his character. I felt his gaze on my skin; it was like he was pushing against me, trying to get in. A few tears still clung to his eyelashes. I wanted to lick them away. I opened my mouth to speak to him, but in that moment he turned from me, looking out across the audience and back to the table, where his eyes settled on the cake.
He rose slowly, wiping his face with the back of his forearm, and used a knife from the table to cut a single piece. He grazed the icing with his fingertips as he moved the slice onto a side plate. Then, holding it with both hands, he walked to the edge of the stage and lowered himself to his knees and held the cake out towards me. I took it, and the room went dark.
When the lights came back on, he was standing in the centre of the stage with Julie. I hadn’t heard him move. I had thought I felt him close in the dark. The unreality of it dizzied me. In the moment of silence before the applause, I saw him take Julie’s hand. I remember that he didn’t have to look for it. His hand moved through the air at his side and closed around hers as though he could feel the weight of it in the space between them. They bowed twice and as the curtain closed in front of them, I saw him lift his free hand to her mouth and I saw her lick the icing from his fingers.
I left the side plate on my chair and pushed out into the night. In my hand, the cake squished between my fingers and bits of it fell as I walked. I dropped the lump of it under the nearest tree. Let the squirrels have it.
On the train I sat in the corner. I was not used to them yet: trains. The whole project of them overwhelmed me. The planning and the laying of tracks and the manufacturing of parts and the timetabling. And then there was the proximity to strangers and the sickly sweet sense of sharing something with them as we travelled the same routes.
In the carriage with me there was only a man. He wore a light blue work shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and was sitting about halfway down the carriage. He was facing towards me so that the scenes through the window rushed past from behind him. I found the strangeness of it endearing. Who would choose to face the wrong direction on a train? Perhaps it was linked to a fear of some sort, I thought, a weakness of constitution that was triggered by the onslaught of the world as it crowded towards him through the glass.
He struck me as a gentle man. He had glanced up at me when I walked in, but then quickly down again at whatever he was holding in his lap. Maybe a book, I thought. I liked that. But as I watched him, I could tell he was not reading. His eyes were settled on one spot, and did not move.
I sat forward in my seat, trying to better see his face, but it was angled down in a way that obscured most of it. Unmistakably, though, his eyes were still. My fingers were sticky with icing but I put them on the back of the seat in front of me and leaned closer. Maybe the motion of the train made him feel sick, I thought. Maybe he was also unsettled by them. Maybe he had come from far away, like me. Or maybe he could feel me watching. If he could, he was staying still so that I wouldn’t look away. I was certain.
I wanted him to know that it was okay, that I understood him. He didn’t know it yet, but he understood me too. But I needed him to look at me. I kicked the wall of the train hard. The sound of it echoed through the carriage and the man looked up and directly at me. He looked uncertain, almost afraid, and his eyes flickered from me at first, but when I kept looking they returned to me and I held them there with my gaze.
We stared at each other then, and I knew that in that moment I was alive to him in a visceral way, more alive than anything else in the world, so alive that I had curled up inside of him and he would feel me there forever. I felt the tears well in the corners of my eyes and roll warmly down my cheeks. I opened my mouth to taste them.