Two-Two-Two
Once upon a time, we knew a couple who seemed quite content in their life together, but read on. After fourteen years of marriage, they began a little game, something the husband discovered in his idle reading. The Romans, he learned, had a custom of marking each day as happy or unhappy by dropping a white or black pebble into an urn. To the husband this sounded like fun. He bought, at a florist’s shop, smooth white stones and smooth black stones. He placed them in a dish beside a vase on a dresser in their bedroom. The idea was that at night, before going to bed, they would drop a stone into the vase. At the end of a month, they would spill the stones from the vase and see what kind of month it had been. They tried this one March, which, in Boston, was probably the first mistake. At the end of the month, they spilled the stones out onto their bed and separated them. There were twenty-nine white stones, seven black. “But that’s only thirty-six stones,” said he. “There should be sixty-two — thirty-one each.”
“Is that what you thought?” she asked. “That we’d put a stone in every day?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t see it that way at all,” she said. “That way, we’d have to call every day either good or bad. Days aren’t like that. Don’t you agree? I mean, I can see that if we had gray stones, we’d put a stone in every day, and at the end of the month most of the stones would be gray, but we don’t have gray stones, so we put in a white stone if we have a really great day, and we put a black stone in if we have a really lousy day.”
So, they tried it her way, and at the end of April there were only six stones in the vase: three black, three white. The husband shrugged this off. “Well,” he said, “that’s pretty good. They balance out.” For the wife, however, the month was a revelation, since none of the stones were hers. For her the month had been entirely gray. In fact, since she hadn’t had any actual gray stones to deposit, it had been worse than gray: her month had amounted to nothing, nothing at all. This set her to thinking. She began a month-by-month stepping-stone excursion into the past, curious to see how far she would have to go before she encountered a month that might fill a vase. She went far enough to see that her life no longer aroused her. It no longer pleased or angered her enough to warrant a stone, no longer made her feel much of anything. It was a level plain, a windless sea, an empty vase. She blamed this sorry state not on herself, of course, but on her husband, and so, after explaining all of this to him as gently as she could (“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with you — I mean, I really think you’re okay — honest — I mean, you never really did anything wrong — it’s just that — ”), she left him.
He hoped that after a while she would find the world at large even more disappointing than life with him, and she would return. When she did, he imagined, everything would be different — white stones in heaps. Time passed, and she didn’t return, but still he believed that eventually she would. Even as it became less and less likely, he told himself that it still wasn’t impossible, and he couldn’t cure himself of the habit of wishing.
Now his troubles are over. He’s free. He understands how foolish it would be to try to get back together. You can’t raise the dead, he knows now. You can’t undo what time has done. It’s too late to choose another route when you’re at your destination. How did he learn all this? It happened in a single evening spent in the dining room here, observing this ridiculous attempt to revivify the stinking corpse of Two-Two-Two.
— BWB
Two-Two-Two
222 Clarendon Street, 555-2222.
American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club. No checks.
Handicapped: three steps down to entrance, three steps down from lounge to dining room.
Lunch 11–3, Monday–Saturday.
Dinner 7–12 Tuesday–Saturday.
Brunch 12–4 Sunday.
Reservations recommended.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 544, Mark Dorset considers Characters and Characterization from this episode.
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🎧 544: Once upon . . .