Companion to an Untold Story

Egg coddler

77 Egg coddler. Something with a surprise inside. See Last words to me. As he was ridding his apartment of his last possessions, Joel may have found the egg coddler languishing way back on a high shelf, coated in dust. Sweeping for whatever items remained, he stood on a chair, reached as far back as he could, and felt its cold sides. He stuffed the proceeds of the sale of his car into the egg coddler and sent it to me. It was a convenient container, the right size for a wad of bills. Perhaps he thought, wryly, I’ll send Marcia a nest egg. I don’t know the story behind the egg coddler, its origins. I can’t know the place of this object in Joel’s life, what significance , if any, it had. I’d like to think he used the coddler; that’s a story I tell myself, though he didn’t use it every day. He lived alone, and a coddler for one would have suited him. I can see him simmering an egg from time to time, unscrewing the lid, tapping the sides with his spoon to help the egg slide out onto his toast. The egg would jiggle as it slithered out, almost jellied. He’d cut it up, breaking the yolk so it would run onto his thin wheat toast. He was a fastidious eater. Living alone, with little to attend to, he ruminated on the details of his daily 78 life—his meals, the purchase of groceries, his weight. He opened his cupboard, reaching behind his saucers, and lifted the coddler out of its appointed spot, happily noting its solitary swallow in flight, its fit in his grip. After cooking and eating his egg, he held the empty coddler in his hand, still warm as a living thing. But did he use it? I don’t know that. Maybe the coddler sat untouched from the time it entered his apartment (Richard says he never knew Joel to eat a coddled egg). I’ve looked for telltale signs, but my findings are inconclusive. On the outside the coddler shows no chips, fractures, discolorations, or other signs of wear. When I screw off the lid and peer inside, a few flecks the color of egg yolk show in contrast to the creamy china. Are these flecks the discoloration that appears in old objects that have been stored unused? To know, I’d have to send the coddler to a lab, subject it to a battery of scientific tests and analysis, like Joel’s body in autopsy. What I can know is that he chose the egg coddler to transport the thousand dollars to me and that its final use was not its original purpose. Joel subverted its purpose and used it to bring a surprise to me, the surprise of money—and the surprise of his death. As the new owner, as the designated recipient of the egg coddler, I sustain Joel’s practice, not using the coddler for its purpose of cooking eggs. Instead, the coddler , in the Swallow pattern, sits on a bookshelf in my study, in limbo and in memoriam, at the stark forefront of my vision if I swivel my chair to pick up a book. Floating flowers swirl in mauve and yellow, a few purple petals among green leaves, more like tendrils, and a single yellow bird, its wings tinged black and suspended to the side of the flowers on a creamcolored background. Its wings hang in the air like a set of floating jaws. 79 When I look at the coddler, I think of the tangle of his death, think that I won’t ever know what he felt or intended for me, won’t understand my role in his life or his death, what purpose I served in his story. Emotional turmoil swoops down and seizes me like the swallow. Move on, I say to myself, get a grip. And I want to move on, but there’s always a new wrinkle in this surviving business: the dead pop up in my dreams, playing on their resemblance to a living person. I bestow upon the coddler more significance than it likely had in life. I watch a drama, a tiny theater where plays a tragedy that begins and ends differently each time it is performed on my shelf. ...