Free The Night Following by Morag Joss Page A

mouth felt slow and unchaste and slutty. I struggled to say something that would not sound off-balance and degraded. He told me he had already arranged that the garage bill for the Renault’s service would be sent direct to him, and again my words faltered, snagging in the net of his enunciated, suffocating reasonableness. In the moment’s pause, maybe a beat of tenderness passed between us. Then he said if I couldn’t be bothered to stick simple address labels on a few envelopes he would drop by for his letters instead.
    Out of pride I feigned a little cooperation, but really I was thinking of all the things Jeremy and I had done for so long, ostensibly for the other’s sake. What expenditure, what a squandering of spirit, this “working at”our marriage; what a thin and childish pact it was in the first place. If we had ever aspired to a state of marital grace, we had long ago settled instead for efficiency; long after I was weary to extinction at my presence seeming still to be in some way required, I had continued to turn in performances connected with laundry, cleaning, and food. Jeremy had continued to oversee cars, money, and gardening. We had both pretended to be living together in more than the physical sense, wearing for each other the face we supposed the other ought to see because perhaps, behind it, we were guarding a truer, less resolute version of our selves that we feared the other would attack if they knew about it. With slippery expertise we had concealed first the doubt, and then the noiseless, tearing disappointment that life wasn’t fuller and brighter than this. Jeremy went on to mention his passport, I think in relation to the coming summer and “grabbing a fortnight somewhere,”but my attention had wandered by then. I was wondering when it was, exactly, that we’d started to show each other more tact than kindness.
    Since I was awake and it was after four o’clock in the afternoon, I went to my studio—just the smallest bedroom with bare floorboards, an uncurtained window, and a basin in the corner—and tried to think about painting. Illustrated books were open all over the place, reminding me that I had been working on another series of butterfly studies.
    Butterflies. I flipped over a few pages trying to remember what I had once found so captivating. I came across notes in my own writing. There were (I read) many species of butterfly—
Lepidoptera
—whose wing patterns mimicked the appearance of other things in the world. I had begun a list. I counted them on my fingers, right hand first, jammed in my dressing gown pocket, tightening each finger in turn, pressing the end of each nail into my palm just enough to get the nip of the edge on flesh. Some butterflies’wings looked like the golden eyes of a certain poisonous lizard. There was one with the blue-green Argus eyes of peacock feathers. Another had wings like a flamenco dancer’s pair of fans; another, curling, dead autumn leaves. One resembled the veneer of polished walnut, its wings like little cabinet doors. Then there were some that looked like tropical flowers, one in particular, its wings spattered to resemble the lure of dewdrops marking a pathway down a darkening velvet cave into the deeps of an orchid. Or was it the other way round (I had put a question mark after that one). Was it the orchid that had evolved to look like the butterfly’s wings? Whichever was imitating the other, they both looked like something else; here in my writing was another question mark and the word “vagina,”followed by two more question marks. I smiled, seeing how I had used the medical word and surrounded it with those perplexed, small, tidy curls of inquiry.
    But I no longer wanted to know anything about butterflies. A few days ago I would have said I was fascinated by their sheer variety, the opulence of their colors and patterns, and the “challenge”I felt, as a mere amateur, to “do justice”to such delicacy and brilliance. I would