Chapter One Hundred and Five
Petunia rifled through her husband’s valise, then, using a series of implements she gathered from a tool chest in a storeroom, broke open his trunk. His bank accounts and properties would necessarily pass to her, and she wished to spend the remaining days of her confinement in the hotel planning how to shore up his (financial) affairs. She’d fantasised over his death for so long—although in none of her imagined scenarios, she had to admit, had his exit from this life been by his own volition—and pictured herself free of him in so many ways, that she felt an astonishing thrill at it all coming, finally, true: an understudy giddily pushing through the curtain on the night her rival’s impenetrable constitution had suddenly broken down.
But the two most popular scenarios in her fantasies now presented themselves to her: Shall she move back home to live with her sister and aged aunt, welcome widowhood with open arms and spend Marcel’s money without regret? Or shall she seek another shot at love, with someone, somewhere? Either way, the nightmare that had begun with her regrettably hospitable reception of Marcel’s penis into her vagina, now so very long ago, had ended, or proven to be merely a protracted interlude in her life, an interlude whose duration felt endless to the sleeper, but was understood as merely a moment to the woken woman.
Too excited to sit, she skipped about the room, then forced herself into a chair, raised up a foot and massaged it, lovingly, as Marcel had never done: she had run unshod, with the knife, outside, in the snow, then stood for she didn’t know how long staring over the precipice, in shock at her stroke of luck, in so doing acquiring some sort of frostbite, or near relation, which shrivelled up her toes and pained her every step.
The best years of my life have gone, she admitted to herself. He took them. He took them with him, down over the cliff, into oblivion. Still, somewhere, somewhere inside of me, there must be love. The love I was born with—has it all rotted away? Did he poison every last cell of it? Or is it sleeping, waiting to be summoned back to life?
Am I still capable of being loved?
She let her foot fall to the carpet, and cursed him anew. Then she vowed never to utter his name again—to the lawyers, to her family, she would euphemise, she would scrawl his initials—so as to bury him still further in his frozen grave.