The Words He Underlined Tell Me Who He Was
I read his library like a séance, pencil line by pencil line.
My husband died owning one thousand one hundred and forty two books. I know the number because I counted them the week after his funeral, because counting was the only kind of crying I had left in me.
Dev read with a pencil. Always a pencil, never a pen, a stub of a thing he sharpened with the kitchen knife because sharpeners, he insisted, wasted wood. He underlined everything. He underlined novels, cookbooks, the instruction manual for the water heater. Once I caught him underlining a sentence in a warranty booklet and asked what exactly he planned to revisit about a two year guarantee on a ceiling fan. He didn't look up. "I'm not underlining," he said. "I'm replying."
In eleven years of marriage, I never read his margins.
It felt like opening his mail.
Then it was February. The flat was so quiet I could hear the fridge change its mind, the bed had developed a cold half, and at two in the morning I pulled his copy of East of Eden off the shelf because it still smelled like him, which is to say like pencil shavings and the cigarettes he swore he quit in 2009.
Page 412. One line, underlined twice, the second stroke pressed so hard it tore a small valley into the paper: "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
In the margin, in his cramped engineer's handwriting: 14/3/2011.
Three days after our wedding.
I sat on the floor of the study until the birds started... and then I did what any reasonable widow does. I began at the top left shelf and started reading my dead husband's library in order, pencil line by pencil line, a séance conducted at the speed of a slow reader with a full time job.
People ask how you get to know someone through their books, and I used to think it meant the titles. The spines you scan at a party to decide if you'll accept a second drink. It is not the titles. Anyone can own Chekhov. The person lives in the pressure of the pencil.
Dev underlined jokes in tragedies and the one devastating sentence in comic novels. He never marked the famous lines, the ones already quoted to death; he went for the shy sentences hiding two paragraphs later. In a Neruda collection I found a grocery list doing duty as a bookmark: onions, coriander, "the good butter," a small domestic poem in its own right. In a spy thriller I found a boarding pass to Lisbon from 2004, three years before we met, from a trip he had never once mentioned, and I spent a full day jealous of a city.
And he dated everything.
That was the part that undid me. The dates turned his shelves into a diary he never knew he was keeping, or knew exactly. There was a line about fathers underlined the week his own father died. There was a whole page of Marcus Aurelius gone over in the pale strokes of a man reading in hospital light. My husband, who answered "how are you feeling" the way other men answer customs officers, had been holding a long argument with memory in the margins of used paperbacks, and I had been sleeping next to it for a decade.
He wasn't underlining. He was replying. It just took him dying for me to hold up my end of the conversation.
Shelf by shelf, I replied back. I laughed out loud alone at midnight at what he found funny in 1998. I learned he had a weakness for endings where nobody is forgiven but everyone eats dinner anyway. I learned he read the same forty pages of Anna Karenina four times across twenty years and never once finished it, which explained a great deal about his relationship with our bathroom renovation.
Then, in October, on the second to last shelf, I opened a slim anthology of poems and found August.
The grief section was covered in pencil. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," underlined once, gently... the way you touch a bruise to check if it's real. And in the margin, dated the ninth of August: "How do I tell R?"
He told me on the second of December. I remember because it was raining and he made me sit down first and I thought he was going to confess to buying another boat magazine subscription. The doctors gave him seven months and he lasted five and a half, and I had believed, all through that autumn, that we were simply having a good year. He repainted the kitchen. He drove us to the coast on a Tuesday for no reason. He learned, at fifty three, to make my mother's dal, standing over the pot with the recipe like a man defusing something.
He had known for four months.
He had been saying goodbye in secret, in home improvement and lentils, and I had missed it... and there is no one left to shout at.
I was furious with a dead man in pencil. You cannot slam a door on a margin note. I put the anthology in the freezer, which is not a grief technique I can explain or recommend, and did not touch the shelves for three weeks.
When I finally took the book out and let it thaw, I read past the poem, because he had taught me that the real sentence hides two paragraphs later. Four pages on, under a poem about a widow, in handwriting smaller and shakier than August's: "She'll find this. She reads everything eventually. Hi, love."
He knew I would count the books. He knew I would start at the top left.
The man planned his own haunting and dated it.
In April I typed out every line he ever underlined. It came to sixty three pages, and reading it straight through was like hearing his voice come out of a hundred borrowed mouths. Certain lines rhymed with each other across decades, Steinbeck answering Neruda answering a water heater manual, and I began moving them around on the floor of the study like a woman assembling a person from spare parts. There is a name for what I made. A cento: a patchwork poem built entirely from other people's lines. Mine was thirty one lines long and every single word of it was his, which is to say none of it was... which is to say it was the truest thing I never wrote.
I had spent a year walking wide circles around the grief, and here I was finally writing straight into it with a dead man's pencil marks for a map. I entered the cento into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because deadlines are load bearing when you live alone. It didn't win. He would have underlined the rejection email twice and dated it.
The library stands at one thousand one hundred and forty three books now, because I bought a new copy of Anna Karenina and finished it for him. It took me two months and I understood, somewhere in the middle, why he kept stopping: some books you save the way you save the good butter.
I read with his pencil stub these days. I underline my answers under his underlines and I date them, so that whoever inherits these shelves inherits both sides of the conversation, the call and the response, a marriage continuing in the margins at the speed of whoever reads slowest.
Last week, in the anthology, under the shakiest handwriting he ever left me, I finally wrote back. The study was quiet. The fridge had nothing to say. I put down the date, and then... "Hi, love. Found it."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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