Remembering Suzie

Remembering Suzie
by Barnali Saha

(Article Publishe din Many Midnights Magazine:http://www.geocities.com/many_midnights/story_11.htm?200926%3E%3Chr%3E%3Cbr%3E%20%3Cfont%20size=)

"The word pity has more earthly connotations that you think it has, but when self-pity comes into the scene, you are dead." These were Suzie's words, Suzy, my wife, she is dead now. They found her in her dressing room this morning, enveloped in a pool of thick red blood floating from her wrist, which she had slit open with her little pocket- knife. There was hair all over the room; balls and threads of her pigmented filaments were like russet toppings on her molten cherry blood. She wasn’t wearing her wig today, she always wore that; it was a part of her like her limbs.

Suzie was an actress, not a famous one, yet a known name in the local daily soap industry. I always thought she had great potential as an artist; she was a full package—beautiful, voluptuous, with thick black eyelids and a pair of crispy blue eyes like the ocean. She was a great actor too, a natural, always into her role, always serious with every script she was given. May be she took them a little more personally than she should have. I still remember he role as Becky, a neurotic woman in Daily Lies, who lost her husband to another woman. Suzie had received some kind of Critic’s Choice award for that role. I can recall her lines in a monologue, “A fresh cover of snow has enveloped the sordid emotions of the earth with its virgin veil, and I wait for the snow to cover me, my unfulfilled desires.” They had focused the camera on her face after the dialogue, painful tears were welling the corners of her deep ocean blues; there was so much pain in them, pain that no anodyne with its analgesic power could embalm. I had asked Suzie about that when she returned from the set that day, but she was as eluding in her reply as ever, “Don’t worry Bob,” she had replied, “I am into serious acting and you know that.”

I never fully understood Susan, she was my wife, but there was another side of Suzie that I never came to know, a side that she would always mask, probably with her wig. I thought it was a Sisyphean task on my part too to have even thought of discovering her; she was a mysterious lady like Keats’s maiden in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a woman who was always a part of my life for over seven years but whom I scarcely knew. I began feeling the entropy of energy as the years passed by, and I had more important things to do, a business, for example, to handle, than to think about discovering my wife. In most evenings, when she would not be working, I would find her locked up in her room, sobbing relentlessly or sleeping in the dark. She suffered from pangs of depression from time to time. We went to a doctor who said that the condition was curable and that Suzie would need a baby do the miracle. But sadly, before the plan could work out, she decided to kill herself; she never thought about me. I guess I am talking too much and I cannot help it. The house is so cold and empty; I can feel the stillness in the wooden floors, in the checkered tiles of the kitchen, in the sheer white curtains lifted by the wind. I locked Suzie’s room upstairs, I wanted to sleep in her room tonight to allay my initial pain but the room was unbearable, I felt claustrophobic inside it; there was hair everywhere, in every square inch of her room. I was sick for a moment.

It is midnight; the church clock just announced the dead hour with its loud bangs. I am on my bed, remembering Suzie. The pillow is wet already and I am cold. The coiling darkness in my room is slit by a streak of pale moonlight coming through the glass window on my right. I touch Suzie’s pillow, the warm pink color still smells like her. I turn my torso and press her pillow on my chest and try to sleep. Something brushes on my nose, I open my eyes, and it is Suzie’s hair— a strand of her hair, which she might have plucked from her head before killing herself this morning. In the darkness, I lay still in anticipation of something supernatural, like another hair. I lay still; another hour walks by me, still nothing.

I unlock Suzie’s room; I had just heard a noise, I switch on the light. The room is now a chiaroscuro of an unknown artist. I scan the room; there is an outline of Suzie’s body on the ground made by the police with a chalk or something. The maroon sheet on the bed is folded in creases by some tumultuous soul. The closet is locked and the wooden dressing table is in usual order except that there are Suzie’s hand prints on the otherwise shinning mirror. I can see the lines of her hand in those prints. I stare at them for sometime then decide to leave; the stillness is unbearable. I switch off the light, walk outside and as I am about to close the door I see something. I drag the door and peek through a small opening. I guess that is Suzie, but she is nebulous now, almost pale and shadowy like the moonlight. I rub my eyes stare at it agape. Suzie is lying on her creased bed plucking her hair like tea leaves; one, two and then pulls out a bunch of them; she couldn’t see me, she is too busy. She plucks her hair, smells it and then throws them on the ground; she rubs her hand on her balding scalp with small outcrops of hair here and there in search of long strands. She finds nothing in the right side, her hand reaches the back of her head, some strands are still remaining there, there is a smile on her lips, a cold smile in the parched corners of her mouth, and she waves her body, as if swinging to her blues. Suzie tears away the hair and rubs them gently on her gray cheeks, and then she licks them like a sumptuous meal. I cannot see anymore, I feel I am dying, my lids are getting heavy—I slam the door and rush downstairs to my room. I thump my body on my brown lazy boy chair and try to gather my senses, but even as I do so I can see Suzie’s desperation, the bald patches and small hairy outgrowth which she hid with her blonde wig, her despondence and her tenuous carcass still plucking her hair. The night is so long I need some respite, I touch my head, and there are heavy curls everywhere, and I pluck at one strand. Ouch!! It hurts. I am now holding a strand of my curly hair, I feel good, and I feel like Suzie.