Ideal
By Robert Stone
Tom watched his wife’s reflection as she sat at her dressing table and painted her eyelids. This now struck him for the first time as an extraordinary thing to do, but especially so for a woman like Edith.
— You must be very bored, he said to her.
— I don’t know. I think I might be.
He was waiting for Edith to be ready to go to the party. He had been ready for some time, but he was not impatient. He would rather be bored here than bored there. He adjusted the hand of Edith’s rather grand clock, comparing its time with that of his watch, but he meant nothing by it. Putting on some music was a good idea, but he didn’t want to do that. Edith was concentrating on her make-up, putting it on then taking it off again, and was occupying Tom with the very small part of her mind which that business required. He did not wish to be handled so easily.
— You could put on a record, she said.
— I will, he said.
He looked through the dresses on the rail. All black. He shifted them along with the back of his hand, unconsciously careful not to mark them, not wincing for the discreet screech the hangers made. They all looked the same to him. He wondered what other men would think of them, would think of Edith in them. They were all quite new, of course, and really rather expensive. No old favourites. She had not owned any of these dresses when she had been married to her first husband.
— What on earth do you think you are doing?
— I’ll put on a record.
Tom sat down on the window seat, crossed his legs, pulled a piece of lint from his sock, and then, hardly daring to drop it on the carpet, put his hand in his pocket. Their street was a quiet one, but the early evening passers-by allowed themselves some well-bred conviviality. There were no children and no dogs. It was still quite bright outside, and the light felt warm. Tom was hot in his collar and tie, and he would have opened the window a crack, but his wife was almost naked.
He stared at Edith’s narrow back, that pale slim rectangle bound by the black strips of her underwear as she leaned forward on her stool. Edith rarely reminded Tom of Emily, but she did so now. The body of a woman who had never borne a child and perhaps who never would. An American friend of Tom’s, one whom he no longer saw, had said, before he heard that Tom had married her, that Edith was as vulnerable as a bull-whip. He pushed a candle away from him with his foot and made the shadows fall differently across his wife’s body. She seemed to him to be the only real thing that there was. Then he saw that Edith, staring at her reflection, was watching him watching her, and he turned to look out of the window.
So then he saw the man again, across the road, standing in the doorway of the chemist’s shop, not exactly opposite the house, but still, perhaps looking up at the lighted window of Edith’s dressing room. Tom thought he recognized him, but he had no idea who he was. Perhaps he had seen him in a dream or a film.
— There’s that chap again, he said, unaware that Edith had been talking to him and so unwittingly interrupting her. The one. I don’t know if I told you about him. I keep almost bumping into him. I’ve seen him in the street more than once. I am certain I know him.
He hesitated.
— I’m not sure I really like the look of him, he said.
— What does he look like? I can’t see him.
Edith was suddenly beside her husband, at the window, still dressed only in her black underwear. Tom was surprised and aware that she was standing at the lighted window so exposed. But when he looked down into the street, the man was gone. He drew the curtain to shroud his wife.
— He’s gone now.
— What does he look like?
She turned to the rail of dresses, and Tom watched her thoughtfully. He smiled.
— Funny thing is, if I answered that question, I would say what no one ever says. I think he looks like me.
Padma Rajendran, There is No Salvation without a Guru, There is no Heir without a Woman, 2015, Silkscreen monotype with acrylic, pompoms, party fringe, and carved wood, approximately 82" x 40".
–––
Tom might have been in the office, where he had implied rather than said he would be, but he had gone to visit Emily, in the middle of the afternoon, to find her already drinking a glass of sherry, sitting on the floor listening to records and still in her dressing gown. She was so childish. Tom disapproved and was also glad. Emily allowed him to treat her quite badly. Tom loved Emily. She had a great physical appeal, certainly, but it would be ridiculous to love someone just for that.
They sat cross-legged on the floor opposite one another while Emily showed Tom the shell game she had just learned from somewhere; switching three shells, hiding one glass bead, constantly brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes pulling her gown impatiently as it repeatedly almost came undone, and laughing. Tom’s guesses were always wrong, partly because he was not really paying attention.
— Not the first, the third.
And then,
— Not the third, the first.
She was very pleased to see him being so stupid.
Tom could not stop coming to see Emily, but he would never give Edith up for her, and they were both sure of that. Emily was a girl, not actually so young now, and Edith had already been married twice. Tom’s life would only have had to be different in some small details — a holiday taken at another time, or even one drink too many or too few at a certain party — and he would never have married Edith. But Emily had always been there.
He stood up and walked to the mantelpiece, and put his drink down on it. He looked through Emily’s untidy collection of invitations and postcards, but without reading them. There was a paperweight with a Christmas scene that snowed when you shook it. There was also a photograph of himself propped behind the travel clock. He had once asked Emily to describe it. A clean shapely head with crisp closely cut chestnut hair, a straight little face, white teeth, and a darling wide smile. Emily knew he wanted to talk, and she put on a more serious demeanour.
— I’ve seen him again. That chap in the street. He came out of the chemist’s just as my cab pulled away. I almost made the driver stop.
— Did you get a better look at him?
— No, unfortunately. I think he may have seen me and turned away.
— But you still think it was Walton. Edith’s husband.
— I am Edith’s husband, Emily. But yes, I think it was Walton, her first husband.
— You’ve never seen him, though.
— There are lots of photographs and, actually, I rather think I see him all of the time.
— So, the question is, ‘Why is he hanging around?’ Does Edith know? Have you told her?
— That is three questions, and I only know the answer to the third one.
Tom picked up the little glass cat that he thought he might have given to Emily years ago, but was not quite sure. He put that down again. Emily’s room was very clean and orderly. Almost spinsterish.
— We never talk about him. I don’t really know the real reason they were divorced.
Emily shuddered as though she were suddenly cold even in this hot room.
— Edith scares the pants off me, she said.
Tom laughed.
— He is there between us, because he’s not been talked away. A third party. And I can’t get over how much he looks like me.
— He doesn’t really.
— He does though.
— I wonder if Edith thinks so. You are her type.
— That is so silly. How can any serious person have a type?
— It’s flattering in a way. You are her ideal man. Or you look as though you might be.
— If I died, she could replace me easily.
— Well I couldn’t, Tommy. You’re my favourite.
He walked over to her for a kiss.
Tom was almost 100% certain that he felt no jealousy over Emily, although perhaps there was no such thing as that. Surely no one sees someone else preferred and feels quite indifferent. He was jealous of Walton, he knew that much.
He pulled Emily towards him, and she let the dressing gown fall open. When he pulled, she never pushed away, and that almost disappointed him. It meant that she could never afford to refuse him and so could never afford to be really herself.
— I think you find Edith attractive, he said.
— That’s possible. I think I might do whatever she asked of me.
Whitney Lynn, Before the Wax Melts, 2022, Performance in seven acts with vintage burlesque fans and boas, synthetic hair, sequins, cultured pearls, noisemakers, rhinestones, plastic tinsel, airplane wire, drone, and Miami Beach art fair. Image credit: Carolina Menendez.
–––
Tom took the squares of gaudy foil, his unopened contraceptive sheaths, and threw these into the bin outside the chemist’s where he had bought them that morning. Edith was on the pill. He dared not keep them. That would have been like nursing a rattlesnake in his pocket. He could have kept them at Emily’s, but that idea struck him as squalid and presumptuous. What if he had looked for them in the cabinet there and found the supply diminished? That was not jealousy. More like hygiene.
He bought so many contraceptives from this shop. Always from the same little man. He must have thought Tom was some kind of stallion. Tom often walked past the shop so absent-mindedly that he failed to notice it was there at all, but now it occurred to him to go in there and try to find out if this chemist had seen Walton, or the man who looked like Walton.
There was no one else in the shop. Tom’s eyes moved automatically to the contraceptives. He usually bought a number of different kinds — Emily seemed to like looking through them — but he didn’t linger over them. Discreetly, the chemist, white-coated and bespectacled, ordinarily spoke to Tom as though he had never seen him before. But this time was different.
— Your prescription is ready, sir. I have it in the back room.
The look of alarmed surprise in Tom’s eyes stopped him.
— I’m sorry. I have made a mistake. That is for a different gentleman.
— What do you mean? Who is this prescription for? What’s his name?
The chemist smiled, a smile of embarrassed pity. He fiddled with the top button of his lab coat as though he might slip it off suddenly and reveal his true identity.
— I thought you were a different man.
— A man who looks like me.
The chemist shrugged. Possibly implying that a lot of the men who came into his shop looked the same to him. Tom had an impulse to offer him fifty pounds for the name, but he hesitated, the moment passed, and he thought the chemist might phone the police if he did such a thing. He bought more contraceptives and left. Throwing them away as soon as he got outside.
–––
Another hot afternoon, and Tom had the idea of sitting in the pub on the corner with half a bitter and seeing who came in. He had to wait less than ten minutes.
— Can I get you another? I think I owe you one.
Tom looked up at a man standing over him, holding an empty glass, not the first he had emptied that day, evidently. He had never seen him before.
— Another half. Obliged to you, Tom said.
— Taking it easy, are we? With a bleary chuckle. A joke not intended to be funny, only friendly.
Tom did not know this man, and he didn’t consider him the sort of man he would know. Nor the sort of man Walton would know.
— Cigarette?
— I don’t, said Tom.
— Since when?
— I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.
That’s when they got down to it. When it became clear to them both.
— What was he like, this chap you took me for? Tom asked.
— Well I could have sworn… I feel a bit of a fool. You could be brothers, you know? Twin brothers almost. And yet there was something I didn’t think was quite right. Your colour. Your profile. That suit.
— What was different then?
The man was hesitant. He looked around a couple of times, perhaps in the hope that Walton would come in and he could just point at him. Tom consulted his watch.
— Well, you didn’t seem quite comfortable here. Quite used to this kind of place.
— And he did of course.
— Oh. Yes. Very much at home.
— You don’t remember his name?
— Never knew it.
— I suppose you wouldn’t know where you might find him?
— I expect I shall bump into him. You do, you know. Men like us. Now I know both of you, I shall have a story to tell him.
Tom had a scotch after his new friend had left. He didn’t drink a lot of beer. He wouldn’t go home just yet. There was something he had to think out. He did not care for this place, but he sat on. It bothered him that no one came to collect the glasses on his table. The smoke was turning the air a grey-blue. Three men at a table nearby were getting too cheerful and looked over at him now and then, feeling judged by his own thoughtful silence. The pub struck him as a melancholy place at just this hour, full of men guilty that they were not elsewhere, covering the sadness of little failures with loud voices and too many jokes told too often.
What most bothered Tom, though, was the conviction that the man he had been taken for in the chemist’s and now in the pub was not the man he had seen from the window of Edith’s dressing room, not the man he had almost caught up with at the entrance to the Tube station. Not Walton, in short. The chemist and the drinker had been talking to a much less elusive, more substantial chap. If Walton was haunting this street, presumably awaiting an opportunity to speak to Edith again after all of these years, or just to see her, see if she had changed, what she was now like. Perhaps even to get a look at Tom. If he was doing this then he would not be collecting prescriptions or drinking the afternoon away in this shabby pub. What would be the point of that? No, certainly, the chemist and the drinker had not met his Walton.
–––
Tom thought he might stroll along to the office. He liked to drop in every week or so, just to remind them that he was still alive. He had no real need to go there more than two or three times a year. Some junior staff had worked for the bank for eighteen months or more and had no idea who he was. They had a fellow there who liaised with him; he gave him things to read so that he might feel that he actually worked there, but not enough to bore him. He took out and put nothing back. He knew all of this, and it was of no concern to him. It allowed him to say to himself,
— I do work.
He decided he could go to Emily now and skip the office. Then he saw Walton again. They had closed the Tube station for ten minutes while the congestion on the platforms cleared, and there he was, in the crowd waiting to go inside. He called his name, but he did not turn round. Tom squeezed through to him and called to him again. Tom thought he flinched. He got close enough and reached out and put his hand on his shoulder. How strange it felt to be touching him, knowing him to be real, after all of these weeks. The man turned and showed Tom a face so pale and shockingly afraid, as though he had seen a ghost, that he pulled his hand away like he had gone to touch a sleeping man and found him dead. And then he was lost in the press, and Tom did not follow him down.
–––
He decided to just come out with it.
— Edith, did Walton smoke?
He had surprised her, and that hadn’t happened for a while.
— Thomas. You are not thinking of taking up smoking are you?
— No. Of course I’m not.
He was aware that his wife thought she was much cleverer than him. He agreed with her, but he didn’t like to be treated as though he were actually stupid.
— I just wondered if that was anything you had to put up with once.
— I’ve had to put up with a lot more than that.
— I don’t suppose you know why you should have to?
Edith didn’t answer him.
Tom knew immediately that Emily was worried. Whenever she saw him at her apartment, she always behaved as though she thought it was really rather funny that he was there. Not this time.
— Tommy, I heard rather a shocking piece of news the other day.
Tom thought,
— Oh Christ. You’re not pregnant are you?
But he wasn’t quite callous enough to say that out loud.
— I bumped into Julia in the Cromwell Road. I hadn’t seen her for an age and for whatever reason she thought it appropriate to tell me, she did tell me. Timothy Walton is dead.
— When did this happen? Just the other day…
— Julia tells me that he died abroad. She was vague about exactly where, but it was more than six months ago. It appears he may have died by his own hand I am sorry to say, but then people often say that when it isn’t really true and just as often deny it when it is a definite fact.
Emily was arranging little mirrors around her candles. Illusory candles proliferated, outnumbering the real, but the light was real. To Tom now, Emily seemed to be twittering distractingly while he juggled a series of dangerous objects, sharp or aflame. He was glad that Walton was dead so that he could no longer predate Edith. He was ashamed of that feeling; that poor, miserable man whom he had never met and who had never done him the least harm, perhaps not given him the least thought. Who had he seen? On whose shoulder had he laid his nervous hand? Could it really be true that it was not Walton’s? That seemed impossible. And there was another consideration.
— I have to think of how to tell Edith.
— Surely she must know. I know.
— I don’t think so. There’s been no sign. She hasn’t mourned. Not at all.
Emily turned away, which was eloquent enough to Tom.
— She’s not so hard, you know. I mean, it’s been years, but...nothing?
— She may already have dispensed with him. Made a decision to forget about him. People do that.
Whitney Lynn, Before the Wax Melts (detail), 2022, Performance in seven acts with vintage burlesque fans and boas, synthetic hair, sequins, cultured pearls, noisemakers, rhinestones, plastic tinsel, airplane wire, drone, and Miami Beach art fair.
Tom knew that he was being accused of and forgiven for a crime he had yet to commit.
— I know, said Edith. His mother wrote to me. Who told you?
— I’m very surprised, Edith, that you didn’t say anything.
— But you didn’t know Timothy. He was nothing to do with you. I was very young when I married him.
Tom hadn’t known what to hope for from Edith when he told her his news. He may have wanted her to be shocked, to need some comfort. He may have wanted her to say that it was not so, that Walton was not dead. He was dead now.
— It’s natural for me to have an interest.
He stared out of the window because Edith did not reply.
— You loved both of us once, he wanted to say. There was a time when you were excited to see us. You looked at us with desire. We made you happy.
— I wonder who the man in the street was, he said. Perhaps he called me the man in the window.
— Ghosts disappear when you name them, said Edith.
Edith saw Tom standing at her dressing room window on numerous occasions in the weeks that followed. She never said anything, but the sight of him looking out, not looking in, became one of the emblems of her loneliness.
Tom got into the habit of walking along the street past his own front door to the pub on the corner and then walking back without going into the pub or his own house. He could not settle. He stood in the chemist’s doorway. He did not see the man he had thought was Walton.
Edith said to Tom,
— You are closer to being simple-minded than any very clever man I have ever met.
Tom was standing at the window. He was upset.
— I can’t help what I’ve seen, Edith.
Edith was sitting at her desk and looking through her paints, sorting reds, trying to decide on just the right one. She was fastidious about this and absorbed. Tom liked her painting, but was bewildered by such processes. He could not distinguish between the candidates who engaged her dedication.
— I saw him. I know it was him.
Tom had seen Walton again. He had been on the other side of the pond in the park. He had spoken to a child. Not at all like a ghost. Tom had called, shouted out to him, but he gave no indication that he had heard, although other people did.
— Well you cannot have done so and that’s all there is to it.
— I was really pleased to see him. To see him again. And he did frighten me, of course.
Edith had still not looked up from her pots.
— It was someone who looked like him, Thomas, like this man, Timothy Walton, whom you never saw while he was alive.
Tom remembered seeing a play in which the two actors had talked for several minutes before the audience realized that they were not talking to one another, they were both speaking to two other actors standing just off stage or hidden by scenery and props.
— I only see him when you are here, he said, but he said this very quietly.
Tom had told Edith that he was going away for a couple of days, perhaps to the coast. She had said that was certainly a good idea. He was not going away; however, he wanted to stay in London and hunt concentratedly for Walton until he had found him. What he had wanted to tell Edith was,
— I don’t mind if you love Walton still. We can love more than one person.
He wanted to tell her something about Emily, but he didn’t know what that was.
Tom stood in the doorway of the chemist’s shop, his sheltering made plausible by the merest hint of rain, looked up at the light in the window of Edith’s dressing room, and thought about what Emily had been saying to him that afternoon.
Emily had told Tom that he was infatuated with Edith. Like a boy might be with the first pretty girl who had allowed him to kiss her. As she, Emily, had once been with Tom.
— Under the circumstances, one wonders how you can excuse yourself for this.
He had been telling her of a dream.
— I am travelling along a railway track at great speed. I have three choices: keep on like this, end it, allowing myself to fall onto the rail or throw myself to the side and try to escape the devastation of an oncoming train. I choose the third option, but realize that I have misjudged my leap and am sure to land on the rail anyway. Death is certain, but this cannot happen in a dream, and so that moment of death, or just before dying, is suspended.
It was clear that Emily had not been listening. He looked for the sherry. Tom was reminded that there is a limit to how interested one can be in another person.
Now Tom was standing alone in the rain, pulling his thin overcoat more tightly around him and looking up at the warm amber rectangle of his wife’s room. Looking into the window was like looking into the past. When he had stood there, looking down, he had been staring into the future. He was distraught. He had been so then, quietly, and was so now, demonstrably. A small, pearl-grey, rather beautiful cat joined him in his shelter.
He had lost Edith. Watching her in the window, wearing the dressing gown he had bought her for their anniversary, was like examining the painting of a dead woman. She was so beyond him. He had had a chance, and that was now over. Edith had tested him and pronounced him a failure. Any plausible man she had never known was now closer to her, more likely, than Tom was.
He watched as the man came into view, with his straight little face, as inevitably as the hand of a clock moving into place. Quite a distinguished-looking fellow. Edith turned to him and raised her hands and put them on his shoulders. Raised her hands and put them on his shoulders. Raised her hands and put them on his shoulders.
Joshua Pelletier, Elephant Graveyard, 2013, drawing on cotton rag, 52" x 38".
Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton in the UK. He worked in a press cuttings agency in London for thirty years and is now retired. Before that, he was a teacher and then foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. His stories have appeared in Stand, 3:AM, The Write Launch, Confingo, The Decadent Review, The Westchester Review, Metachrosis, Willesden Herald and Lunate. Three of his stories were published in the Nightjar chapbook series. A story appeared in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020.
Padma Rajendran was born in Klang, Malaysia. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and received her M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited at Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), Beers London (UK), Field Projects (New York), September Gallery (Hudson, NY) and BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn), the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz, NY), and at Deanna Evans Projects (New York). She lives and works in Catskill, NY. Her work has been highlighted in Chronogram Magazine, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and The New York Times.
Whitney Lynn has staged performances at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the de Young Museum; screened videos at venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and El Espacio 23; and created public artworks for the San Diego International Airport, Reno City Hall, and Seattle’s Burke-Gilman Trail. She was the inaugural National Artist-in-Residence at The Neon Museum in Las Vegas and has completed residencies at institutions such as the Internet Archive and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. Currently, she is an Artist Fellow with Black Cube, a nomadic museum for site-specific public art. Born on a military base in Arizona, Lynn studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, earned a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is now an Associate Professor of Photo/Media and New Genres at the University of Washington.
Joshua Pelletier, originally from Maine, began his artistic journey as an apprentice with the Maine Stoneworker’s Guild before earning a BA from Bard College in 2000. He later founded the artist collective SALT OF THE VALLEY in the Hudson Valley, organizing exhibitions and events until enrolling in the MFA program at UC Davis. He graduated in 2010 with his first published book of drawings. Following a residency at SVA, he moved to Brooklyn, worked as a fine arts fabricator, and began teaching 3-D Design at Marist College while completing his second book of drawings. Now based in Los Angeles, he has recently outfitted a stone carving shop to expand his sculptural practice and is preparing his third book of drawings for publication in fall 2027.