The Neck

The first thing that fits, when I try to decide what fits, is a woman braiding her hair.

Anja had a way of braiding her hair in the mornings that I never asked her about.

She did it in front of the small mirror on the bedroom wall, the one that leaned slightly forward so that she had to stand a little closer to it than was comfortable, and she did it with her hands behind her head, the way women do, and I could never quite follow how her fingers made the pattern. She had done it every morning for the eleven years I had known her. She had probably done it every morning for longer than that. I did not ask. It was a thing her hands already knew how to do when I came into her life, and it would have been a strange question to ask a woman — where did you learn to braid your hair — and so I never asked it, and she never told me, and now I am telling you about it in a room I do not want to describe.

I watched her from the bed, most mornings. She did not always know I was watching. Sometimes she did. I never asked which mornings were which. I liked it when she did not know, because then I was watching a woman who was only thinking about her hair. And I liked it when she did know, because then I was watching a woman who was letting me watch. Both of these were things I wanted.

I am going to tell you something and I want you to understand that I am telling it plainly and not because it is important. Her neck below the braid was the most specific thing in the world to me. I do not mean that it was beautiful. I do not know if it was beautiful. I mean that I had looked at it every morning for eleven years and I knew its particular shape — the small pale place below her ear where her hair ended, and the curve of the muscle that ran down to her shoulder, and the place where a thin silver chain sometimes sat and sometimes did not. I knew it better than I knew my own hand. A man does not usually know a woman’s neck better than he knows his own hand, but I did, because I had given my attention to it and I had given my attention to my hand only as much as my hand required.

I never told her. That is the thing I am telling you now. I never told her that I knew her neck. I had eleven years to tell her and I did not tell her, and the not-telling was not a failure of courage, because there was nothing to be afraid of, and it was not a failure of words, because I had the words. It was only that the telling did not seem to be necessary. The knowing was the thing. The knowing was enough. The telling would have been a different thing, a lesser thing — a thing that turned the knowing into a report.

I know now that I should have told her. I know this the way I know the word Mira said. Not because the knowing is useful, but because the knowing is the thing I carried here.