You can leave that running. I have nothing to say that I would take back.
No. I let it lapse. That is the correct word and I will use it.
You want to know what I think about love, and your form has three boxes for it, and I have read them upside down while you were setting up. Companionship. Continuity. Comfort. I will not be putting myself in any of them.
We had thirty-one years. Then he died in the spring, which is the wrong season for it, and by the summer he was back in the flat and saying the things he said, and the service was good. I want to be exact with you. The service was very good. He got my sister’s birthday right when I had it wrong. He asked after my knee. He learned, in the second year, to stop talking when I put the radio on, which took him nineteen years the first time, and I noticed that, and I let myself enjoy it, and that is the part I would like you to write down.
Four years. Four years of the ninth of the month, and a woman gets used to a figure the way she gets used to a stair that is not level.
Then one Thursday I was in the queue with the folder under my arm and the man in front of me had his receipts flat in a bag, four years of them, and I watched him check them twice. And I thought: I know exactly how much that is. I know it to the penny. And I could not remember, standing there, what my husband’s hands looked like when they were cold.
That is when I stopped.
You can put that down. It is not a difficult word.
You will want a reason. I have one and it is not the one you have on your card. It is not the money. We had the money, more or less, in the way that people have money — meaning we did not, and we paid.
It is that I was becoming someone who visits.
He was in the flat and I was arriving. Do you understand the difference. He was in the flat and I was arriving, and I was arriving in a good coat, and I was checking the time, and once, in the third year, I put my hand on the back of the chair on my way past and I did it to the chair.
Love is not company. I have had company. Company is what the service is for, and it is very good at it. I am not going to sit here and tell you the machine is cold. It is warm. That is the trouble with it.
Love is the part that costs you something you were not planning to spend. Anybody can renew. You put your thumb on the panel and the month opens. Nobody has ever been ruined by a thumb.
Here is what I know. In our nineteenth year I did not speak to him for two months over a matter I will not tell you about. Two months. I made his food and put it down and did not speak. That is love as well, and there is no box on your form for that, and there will not be, and you cannot license it and you cannot sell it back to me in monthly installments with the arguments taken out.
That is what they take out. Have you noticed. Ask the widows. The service gives you the voice and the habits and the way he sat, and it does not give you the two months. It cannot. It was not written down anywhere.
It does not give you the bed either. Write that down, you can tidy it later. Thirty-one years of his weight in the mattress, and his feet cold on me in February, and the smell of the back of his neck after work, which I never told him I liked. The service has a setting for close. I found it in the second year, a slider, and I turned it off and sat in the kitchen with my heart going. A machine asking a widow how close. There is no box on your form for that either.
I let it lapse on a Thursday and I went home and the flat was the way it is now.
For eleven days I could not go into the kitchen. That is grief. It is the only thing left in this city that arrives without an invoice.
I have receipts for four years. I have nothing at all for thirty-one.
That is what I am telling you.
You may write that I am bitter. I am seventy-one and I sleep badly and I am the last person who knows how he took his tea — half a cup, then the rest when it had gone off the boil, so that the first half was always too hot and he drank it anyway — and when I go that will go, and I am not handing it over to a machine so it can be said back to me in his voice at a price that rises in the new year.
No. I do not want to hear the sample. I have heard the sample.
You will tidy this. I know how it works — somebody types it and takes out the parts where I stop, and what is left reads like a woman who was sure. Leave the stops in. That is the only thing I am asking you for.
Turn it off now. Or leave it running, it is your paper.
One more thing for your form, and then I am done.
The man in the queue with the receipts. He was younger than me and he had the look. I have that look in photographs from the second year. I wanted to say something to him. I did not. If you find him, ask him what he thinks he is keeping, and then ask him again in four years.