I kept forgetting to call my mother and when I remembered she didn’t answer, or if she did the connection was bad and she would only stare at me from far away, her face frozen in its ring of light. I would stare then at the pixels and try to make out what colour eyeshadow she was wearing or what she was having for lunch. At night I would take her into the guest room and lie on the floor and talk to her. B’s great, I would say. He’s getting big. He’s doing this or that, any baby thing. And I would wait for her lips that weren’t moving to ask me, where’s M. And with my lips that weren’t moving I would ask her if it was possible to tell between what a man, what a husband, had to do and what he chose to do, and if had to, and chose to, changed for a husband who became an important man. With my lips that weren’t moving I wanted to tell her that M’s jackets, before I took them to the dry cleaners, sometimes smelled like perfume.

When we left, when we threw the party, we left the door open all night. After the last of the last of the people had kissed us on the cheeks, when they had gone, M closed the door and turned to me. As he turned, loose and expansive and happy, happy to be alone with me, he knocked an open bottle of red wine off the grange ermitage table we had by the door. It fell tumbling, arcing almost absurdly, almost slowly, into the beautiful wool rug. The wool of the carpet was so thick that the bottle didn’t break, didn’t even make a sound, just swallowed it all up and M and me, we just watched all the wine glug out onto it. Sloshing, gurgling, glugging, extravagant and monstrous, and grotesque, spreading for, well, for what seemed like a long time, across the wool. I wanted to tell my mother that now, sometimes I felt like the carpet, drinking things up, and not choosing what, and sometimes I felt like the bottle, caught and not breaking. That sometimes I felt like these things, the carpet and the bottle, rather than the owner of the carpet and the bottle, like I had been before.

At last M came back, late one night, from his trip. I smiled so wide when he opened the door and practically ran over to him to take his bags. He’d surprised me and I wished I’d been wearing something a little fresher, had done my hair maybe, or had cleaned the grit out from underneath my nails.

How was your trip? I said. How was work? What did you see? I was speaking too quickly I knew, showing by how much I talked how little I’d gotten to while he was away. I wished stupidly, for just a moment, to be wearing the same outfit that he was wearing, we could talk then I thought, if I were wearing wool pants and a button-up shirt with a pressed collar. If I were, I would have had something to say.