Deep Wells

That Tuesday afternoon she finally asked him, "What time are you going home?" She raised her eyes from the book she was reading as if she just remembered that he still had a home though it was obvious that she knew this, no – they both knew this from the very beginning. Perhaps she was only thinking about this thought for a while. Perhaps she really did not want him to go and leave her at all. He was not particularly sure whether she wanted him gone or not. Her tone was soft, yet he could not deny the distinct harshness that her tongue possessed for this always created her statements rather bold, dangerous seductive and confusing in some ways.

The two of them were sitting at the opposite of each other at the garden table. Aside from the gentle humming of the birds and buzzing of the bees, the neighbourhood was quiet – too peculiarly quiet. And when the birds found their nests and the bees had already extracted the nectars of the freshly bloomed hibiscus around them, all they were left with was this seemingly strange, and painful silence. At least the frog grass embedded in the soil, covering her entire garden floor gave his body a pleasant chill despite the heat of the glowing afternoon sun brought by the warm weather of April.

She sighed and slowly, turned the page of the very thin book she was holding. He watched her fingers so meticulously ran over that fine piece of paper. By doing this, she looked as if she had the world in her hands and now she was loosening its last remaining screws one by one. Like the way she made his world undone.  Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he noted. But he did not say a word. Well, he did not know what to say. He watched her eyes blinked and glazed over the words of the book she was reading.

Without taking his eyes off hers, he drank the last remaining sips of the now turning cold coffee she especially prepared for him. He just turned fifty-one, married, with a teenage daughter. She, on the other hand, was forty-eight, married, and a mother of two young children. And he did not know why but the three-year age gap between the two of them felt as if she had always been on the far end side of the universe. Always beyond his reach. 

Her husband was a politician, a well-known and extremely successful businessman. And so, he was always away almost every day of their marriage and gone to different places, making sure that his duties and responsibilities as a public servant and a businessman were excellently done and respected. He also liked books. No, he loved them, at least that was what she told him once. In truth, her husband was the reason why she reads all the time. He had seen the thin and thick, hard and soft covers of books, resting alphabetically, lined up according to their genres and authors in those tall wooden shelves inside their home library. The long rows of books arranged neatly seemed like an endless waves of knowledge and information – drowning and somewhat, suffocating to look at. Sometimes, he would look at her husband's shelves and let his eyes wander around the spines of the books and read the authors aloud in his head: Alighieri, Austen, Bronte, Camus, Collins, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Nabokov, Orwell, Sartre, Tolstoy, Woolf... He had never read such books in his life. Whether he would like or hate them, he never had the chance to read them anyway. Not one person in his family, even his young wife were fond of reading long, excruciating novels. It was enough to know that some people loved them. And her husband happened to be one of those.

She even confessed once that some books exhausted her and that sometimes her husband asked more about the books she was reading rather than actually asking how she had been coping up with the kids without him by her side. Nonetheless, she still adored him, she would say. A couple of times she told him, "There's nothing wrong here at home. Nothing at all." And she would smile. "My husband loves me. He's good to me. He's a good public servant. And we love our children. I am happy with this kind of life." She sounded so tranquil that it was almost impossible to determine whether she was telling him the truth or not. She was so nonchalant about her marriage life, making no excuses about everything that she was confessing him. Everything about that topic was handled by her with complete rationality, logic and objectivity. She was talking about her marriage life as if she was discussing a weather forecast for the upcoming days with absolute accuracy. "I'm definitely happy. I don't think there's something to worry about. I don't think something's wrong."