Act One: Unbrewed Tea
Matthew hurriedly fastened the buttons at the cuffs of his plain shirt, then pulled on his dark knitted sweater—the one whose pressed shape had refused, for years, to hold. Time had moved faster than he had expected that morning, and the clock had already passed half past seven. He did not want to linger too long in Lena’s spotless, orderly kitchen, but neither did he want to be late for work.
Matthew moved along the smooth lines of the walls and, as always, drifted into a daydream, tracing their edges in search of a single line out of place, or even a hairline crack. Perhaps the reason was that, somewhere deep in his soul, he wished he were not the only old, disordered image in that excessively perfect house.
Eventually, Matthew’s hopeful gaze wandered from the walls’ tireless lines to the lifeless expanse of the matte navy-blue cabinets: identical, seamless rectangles without handles, like the props representing space cubes in those senseless films that claimed to depict the distant future.
More quietly than a cat’s footfall, Matthew approached one of the cubes and, relying on experience, swiftly and delicately pulled out his plain elephant-gray mug. Behind it, he filled his beloved old pistachio-green enamel kettle with water. He tried to complete his daily tea-making ritual as quickly and silently as possible.
“You got up late again today.”
Lena uttered the sentence in the most wearisome tone imaginable, drawing out every word. She sat behind the perpetually cool, gray-veined white island counter, surrounded by mountains of papers that seemed to belong to her new case file. In her hand was a simple, long-handled porcelain cup filled with her usual white tea, a stick of brown rock sugar stirring it absently. She stared at nothing in particular.
She seemed harmless and calm. But the direction of that seemingly indifferent gaze was something only Matthew could recognize: it was fixed, with concealed disgust, on his enamel kettle.
Matthew stirred his spoon silently in his cup and sank into his thoughts. Sometimes he imagined that the white quartz of the counter was not so different from Lena’s gray stand-collar shirt. In some of his fantasies, he imagined Lena becoming one with that stone, with the house, with its flawless walls—as though the cold scent and the smell of freshly ironed cloth came not from Lena, but from the walls themselves. As though the walls had pledged their eternal allegiance to their true master.
To Matthew, those walls resembled her fine woolen shirt: neither transparent nor heavy, but as delicate as a cloud, their boundaries defined with a precision beyond his understanding. Sometimes he imagined that his house stood among the clouds. And although he lived among clouds, he did everything he could to preserve the pistachio-green enamel kettle—an heirloom from his grandmother—because it offered him a small but tangible proof that he was earthly, that he still lived among the living.
While Matthew wandered through his reverie, Lena finished her tea, gathered her files, and came to stand before him. As she fastened his cuffs again—which, as usual, he had buttoned through the wrong holes—she said, “That kettle doesn’t belong in this kitchen, Matthew.”
Matthew knew she was right. Lena’s electric kettle and stainless-steel teapot suited the house far better, like a small modern sculpture permanently displayed on the counter.
Lena was a tall woman with short, curly hair and lips perpetually painted a magnificent red. Perhaps that was why, whenever she sat on the high stools behind the island, she made that corner even more striking.
For Matthew, even the thought of standing beside the island was agonizing—perhaps because of the full-length mirror next to it. Even if he managed to forget how insignificant he looked beside the island, the mirror would remind him. That was why the dark walnut dining table, with its simple, dignified chairs, felt like a safer place to him—and safer still was the space beside the pistachio-green enamel kettle.
As Matthew put on his black leather shoes, Lena once again took it upon herself to push back the inevitable silence with another simple reminder.
“Matthew, why haven’t you polished your shoes yet?”
Matthew had the feeling that Lena had grown more accustomed to his non-answers than he had. Yet that never stopped her constructive comments from reaching him. Sometimes he suspected that she did not actually expect her words to reach his ears at all; perhaps she merely wanted to repeat the sentences.
So when Lena looked with disgust at his old black city bicycle—with its small basket, rusty lock, and dim headlight—and asked why he did not buy himself a new car, Matthew gave his daily answer:
“Because I don’t need one, darling. It’s only a twelve-minute ride from here to the faculty.”
Then he leaned forward to kiss her goodbye, mounted his old bicycle, and rode away from that house among the clouds—and from that perfect wife—to begin his new day amid earth, stone, and rain.
