There was more blood than I had anticipated. That was one thing. Luckily, most of it kept to the sea, where it washed out into nothing. Into what? I suppose another tendril of life floating in that fabulous blue. It would have been a pity, I thought, to spoil the clean white of the boat. That cloudy, nursery blue that looked like New England. Planks for seats. A pity, sure, but necessary. Let’s not forget that he had it coming. Had it comin’ as they say in the south. I’ve never been there but I romanticize about the double-wide trailers on acres of wheat. Places that could hold a murder secret for years.
But back to the blood. Who knew? Such a little head. So much blood. More blood than anticipated, as previously noted. Don’t like to repeat myself often but that amount of blood is worth the sin. And how watery it was. I always thought it would be more of an ooze, but it’s very watery. Not at all viscid, but no, like vinegar. And the pure softness of the head? Incredible. We bump our way through life accumulating badges of scars of all shapes and sizes and the head stays on, egg-like and lolling. It is a shame that I couldn’t have taken more pictures. As a disciple of J.M.W. Turner, my darling Elizabeth would have no doubt appreciated the dissolving colors of the whole gratuitous mess - Turner of course being one of her own, of God and Queen and country. Or some such shit.
Remember that perfect time at the museum. The old train station - d’Orsay, you devil. Remember how we waited in line in the rain. And the way it felt when the rain ended and we came out of those artistic havens and were greeted with shining cobblestones below our feet. The rays of the afternoon light backfiring from the Seine back to Wayfarers. How France became Spain, and then we leapt into London? Remember that European happiness, how we called it the continent, how we drooled over ol’ J.M.W.’s Sunrise with Sea Monsters.
I revert back to art in her absence. Her favorite thing. How she thought she saw the world different because of Turner, Monet, because of Jackson Pollack; that sedentary drunk who dragged his genius with him through the mud. I was colorblind. Haha. Of course. But she loved the idea of two colors becoming one, and she would have enjoyed the artistic presence in that macabre boat.
She would have enjoyed it, I suppose, if she would have seen it earlier - before the clipping of her own banal life. Of course, without Elizabeth there would have been no Colin, no boat, no leaking body fluid, and most important of all, no tiny fishes feeding on brains! I am not a Godly man, but I am a jealous one. I did not stand under that Protestant steeple and mutter silly fairy tales for my constitution. For God’s sake! Marriage is marriage! What is this place where I have found myself? I feel that those around me are ogres. They are purveyors of poor taste and worse principles.
My libertarian desires, unfortunately, cannot hold a candle in the wind to those magisterial principles of honor and dignity. I mean that I do not blame my dear Elizabeth or her poor Colin for their actions. They are only existing. Or were. But no, while their actions do not elicit any moralistic repugnancies on my part, the severe consequences of those actions most certainly do. There can be, as my mother said, no civility outside truth. She was, of course, wrong. But there lies a faint trench of that aforementioned truth that runs through her elementary observation. Mainly, that if you’re going to lie and cheat, best to keep such surreptitious actions veiled.
Honest though, I think it was their stupidity that I could not forgive. To think that I wouldn’t have figured them out. Ha! Incredible idiots. As if I was blind to their lean-in conversations, that night at the Henderson’s party. Them out on the deck, me fondling my sweating cocktail; the lights of the harbor blinking like stars behind their laughing heads. As if their sideward glances would go unnoticed. Ha!
Though I must say, must give credit where it is due, no matter how posthumous it might be, no matter where it might land on that elastic rubber band of time. They did a fine job in their dogged proclamations of innocence. First her, in the study, with the rope. How even with her last gag she claimed, what? Virtue? And not only that, but confusion as well? And later he - bent over the bow of the boat - white shorts hitched above tanned legs and knees, dropping the anchor, unknowingly manufacturing a sort of tombstone somewhere down there in the shallows. How even after I’d hit him once, how he gasped and reached up for the boat. How he questioned my motives as the blood seeped out of him and became tangled in the waves and then gone into the deep.
So credit to them, for their perseverance to a lie. May they rest in peace.
Oh, dear. What a beautiful bird!
