The Night Anna's Husband Told Her About True Beauty  

‘True beauty,’ says the man fervently, ‘do you understand what it is?’

His wife watches him for a while. She thinks to herself that it is silly and hypocritical of him to look for things like true beauty.
He has a job. She also has a job, so they can pay for everything. They live in a big town. They aren’t very poor at all. She always considered them well-off.
She knows he does not. He came from a poor family, and his parents always made him work in the family shop. He broke away from them when he could not stand working for them any longer. Two months later he met her, his wife, and they married a year later.

She recognizes again and again in her husband that he will never be happy with where they are, never cease to long for something greater. He will always want to be richer than they are, because that will place them further away from his family and his memories of his youth. He reads books by great authors and dreams of writing novels as well, but when he writes he never finishes what he starts. His stories are left hanging after a while, because he grows tired and frustrated with them. He changes his interests often, sometimes almost daily. At one point, he loved tennis. Two months later he threw away his racket in disgust; the wood cracked against the wall. She never cared.

‘True beauty,’ he says, ‘has to happen. It can happen, for instance, when you are looking at a rose.’

She wants to interrupt him at this point to tell him that she prefers lilies, but he holds up a hand to silence her. she wonders briefly if he even noticed her new pearl earrings.

‘When you look at this rose, and you see its colors, that is the beginning.’ He cups his hands and peers into them now, as if he were holding the rose.

‘You recognize its color and agree that it is beautiful. Let’s say this rose is light yellow. A cream colored rose.’ He nods and shifts his hands a little.

‘Next, you perceive the rest of the rose. You feel how soft the petals are. You examine the bright green of the stem and the darker brownish green of the thorns. You feel how firm the thorns are, you feel the texture of the leaves. If it has any leaves,’ he adds.
She listens to him, waiting.

‘You smell the rose and decide that the scent, too, is beautiful.’ He turns to look at his wife, and she feels a sudden surge of anger. There is a patronizing smile on his face, and his eyebrows are raised the way a teacher would raise his eyebrows when explaining something to a dumb student. His hands are spread now, tensed for the rest of his explanation. She bites down on the pink flesh on the inside of her cheek.

‘Now, what have you done?’ he pauses a moment, pretending to wait for an answer. Then he continues. ‘You have created an image of the rose in your mind. Each aspect of the rose is there, in your brain, being saved up in it. You think to yourself that you know every secret the flower has, from the smell to the feel, you know from how strong the stem felt to you, what sound it would make if you wished to snap it; you know what satisfactory twip the petals would make in your fingers if you pulled them out one by one.

‘However, if you are an intelligent, inquisitive person, then even with the knowledge that this flower has no more secrets from you, you will not cease to search it up and down. Making sure, searching and checking it with each crook of your mind.’

Now he has his hands cupped again, and he brings them slightly together; his fingers stretch and turn a tiny bit. She watches him still, breathing as silently as she can.
‘And so, if you are intelligent and inquisitive, you will inspect the flower, even with the little voice in the back of your mind telling you patiently that there is nothing more to see. And when you shift a certain petal, one of the petals more to the center, and you just shift it very slightly, that’s when lightning strikes. You will see that, beneath that petal there is another -the way a rose builds itself- and upon a few petals of this smooth yellow rose, there is a breath of pink!’ his voice has grown very soft and fragile, and she can imagine him sitting in the park, on a wooden bench, taking apart a rose and crying in happiness.

‘This.. this tiny bit of the rose.. these traces of dusky pink on the innermost petals, those were the true secret! Not until now did you actually see what the rose had to hide. And look at your own reaction, you’re breathless and smiling! Even if the last secret had been something totally different, had been a dead maggot, or a small iridescent beetle, or a withered petal, it’s a surprise, and it's what the rose has shared, and it made you gasp! ‘And this realization, this understanding of the rose and simultaneously of yourself, that is true beauty –to be able to be taken by surprise by something you thought you knew, and to be able to recognize that it did take you by surprise. That is something so miraculous.. it doesn’t happen to everyone, you know,’ he says, giving his story a rather flat finish in his wife’s opinion.

‘So.. only if you are inquisitive, and intelligent, will you be passionate enough to keep searching within something, to find something else inside that will catch you off guard? And basically, the only people who will do this are the ones who deserve to see the true beauty you spoke of?’ she reasons back to him.

He nods. The distance between them is tangible. She is sitting back, leaning away from him. She thinks to herself that her new pearl earrings must be giving a glowing reflection of the mild light of the lamp beside her.
The lamp has an antique shade, they inherited it from her grandmother. It is a horrid thing, musty and bright orange, but she loved her grandmother dearly and was happy to have a reminder of her in the house. They also have photographs of her but those are tucked neatly into one of the fake leather albums in the attic.

They are silent for a while more, the wife and her husband. Then she rocks back and forth, a tiny adjustment of her weight. She looks up at him.

‘You said you were going to tell me why you want a divorce,’ she says, and cannot leave the accusatory tone out of her voice.
He looks at her with a distant expression on his face, and expression that gives her the feeling that he is not actually looking at her, but at her nose or her chin, or her nostrils.

‘I have spent.. eleven years, Anna, searching every bit of you. Every leaf and thorn and petal, and up and down the length of your stem, for eleven years. I have brushed my lips across you and bounced my fingers along you, and smelled your scent and felt your soft and your hard and your curves. Every bit of you I have turned over, waiting to be surprised, yearning for a shock of any kind. But there was never any. Nothing about you was ever able to catch me off guard or astonish me.’

‘So you are saying, you never loved me.’

‘I loved you. What I am saying is, there is no true beauty in you, Anna.’ He says, and stands up.

‘You are superficial, like the plastic flowers they sell in shops. They have a beauty that never rots or withers, but they can’t surprise you either. By coming into existence they make you superior to them. The moment you met me, by meeting me and letting me meet you, Anna, you made yourself inferior to me, because I am who I am, and you are who you are.’

She is still sitting, staring, simmering. A man as intelligent as he deems himself, should have known by now never to say something like that to her.

She stands up suddenly, stiff like a mannequin. With short, measured, wooden strides, she moves to the bookshelf and takes out a copy of the Bible.
The Bible is massively heavy; its front is covered in moldy green material with holes in it, here and there. She opens the book. Its pages were glued permanently together some hundred years ago, by her grandfather; then a rectangle was cut out of them, making the book into a box.
She never loved her grandfather the way she did her grandmother. However, when they died in the gas leakage in their building, when she inherited the orange lamp shade, she took this Bible as well; because she was the only person who knew what grandpapa had done to it.

Both the Bible and the lamp shade still smell of the gas, forever. Her husband likes to complain about the odor when it increases, on hotter days. 'Smelly old rubbish,' he'll grunt, only allowing it in his house to appease her.

Now he frowns as she opens the lid.
Inside this box of a Bible is a gun. It is an old gun, shining darkly. It has been polished and oiled and loaded not too long ago, because she was bored. Grandpapa had taught her how to care for a gun, and she had never forgiven him for it until now.

She turns, aims, and fires.

The husband stares at her, surprised. She can see his hands, still tensed for explaining the delicacy of a rose to her. He reaches up and touches where the bullet hit him; dark red blood has begun to spill out of the wound and slop down his Ralph Lauren shirt. He looks back up at her, his mouth open to ask what happened. His fingers are covered in his warm red blood and he holds them up to his face, right in front of his eyes in the weak orange light. He studies his fingers for a full minute.

She watches him swallow and hears his breath get louder and louder.
When he loses his balance and twists about in vain to keep it and falls to the floor, she puts the gun back in the Bible. It’s not a logical thing to do, but it’s where the gun belongs, it was always grandpapa’s gun. She isn’t superstitious, but she feels grandpapa will haunt her if she does not care for the priceless gun, the one he taught her to care for.

She turns back to the man who couldn’t find anything in her that would be truly beautiful.

‘Surprise,’ she says to him, her voice trembling slightly as she looks down at where he is bleeding on her beautiful beige carpet.

And in those words of hers, a whole new world of emotions is triggered in him; she can see it in his eyes. They fill with tears.

‘How beautiful,’ he whispers, ‘how genuinely beautiful of you, Anna!’ he is wheezing for breath, but his expression is that of the man she saw in her vision; sitting on a wooden park bench, cupping a yellow rose and crying because he found a spill of pink inside.  

End.  

AN: i don't own ralph lauren. i'm just using the name to prove a point. namely; blood can be spilt on any shirt.