Dianne Romain Traducción: Anna Adams Silence

SILENCE

It had been 2 days since Cheryl´s husband had spoken to her in the morning, though he sat as usual opposite her at the center island, pouring over his iPhone. It was, she figured, Raymond Carver’s fault. His first line had done it. Cheryl’s husband had tried to stop her, holding up his hand and frowning the way he did with his eyebrows bushing together and the smirk on his lips that meant silence. He insisted on silence in the morning. And other times, too. When he was dumping fusilli into a pot of boiling water. When trying an intricate Charleston skip. When working out fingering on his violin. He would hold up a hand or shush her like a child. It got worse during the Covid crisis, for he was the only one nearby when an idea came to her. Like the first line of Carver’s story “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes.” Her husband should have been more interested in that line than in the iPhone he fingered. For he was, himself, a writer. Cheryl had fallen in love with him when reading his first novel. But he wasn’t, like her, a student of the craft and had read no books about writing fiction, so he claimed, though she’d seen such books on his shelves. She imagined him, like Wittgenstein, caught carrying philosophy books he claimed he never read from a Library in Cambridge. In any case her husband’s stories appeared to have no other source than his toes from within which they sprouted and grew through him until they reached the fountain pen in his fingers and came out on the lined notebooks he carried wherever he went. She would not have interrupted him with a notebook in his hand. She had her limits. But with an iPhone. Really. It wasn’t merely the first line of the Carver story she wanted to discuss, it was something else that had drawn her attention. The protagonist had quit smoking, and the story was published some years before Carver’s death of lung cancer. And so, she wondered, had Carver been using personal experience when writing the story. And, if so—this had been a question on her mind for some time—how much personal experience can you use in a story and have it remain fiction? She would not be having that conversation with her husband that morning. And she wondered how long he would keep up the silence. His hand lifting in a stop sign the moment he sensed her taking in a breath for speech.