The Large Glass

The day began with the enormous print he'd recently had framed, at great and much-remarked-upon expense, crashing to the floor of their apartment, the glass shattering into daggers. It had been the wind.

She returned home in the late morning to find the glass-filled canvas bag that he had left at the front door so he wouldn't have to explain what had happened, or his mood.

The mood had, of late, become a stronger presence in their lives. It had moved in like an unwelcome guest, and it would often sit with them at the dinner table or ride with them in the car or lie between them in their bed at night, unsleeping.

Her mother had always warned her that when it happened, it wouldn't be what she'd expect. They don't treat you better out of guilt, not at all. Instead they hate you for what they're doing. And in the last few months she had apparently begun typing too forcefully, drinking her tea too loudly, sighing too often, and leaving her clothes on the washing line too long.

In the past, he had anger only when it came to meaningless frustrations or to strangers: for other drivers, for neighbors' noise. She had anger only for the people she loved: for her family and for him. But now that seemed to have inverted, or perhaps she had become a kind of stranger herself. And in the last few months her cups had been left around the house more than ever, she had forgotten a tray of leftovers in the oven and let it rot, she was obsequious with waitstaff, she ate more than her share of the grapefruit, and she bored their friends with her long stories.

"There are things I could say," he liked to say, after their fights. "But I won't."

It was a while ago that she'd first seen it, and now it was coming true. She'd seen it one evening when they were outside in a restaurant courtyard. They were meeting another couple, whom they'd recently befriended, except this time the woman arrived alone and explained that it would just be her. That in fact (though she didn't particularly want to talk about it) there had been a separation.

What was it that had been so clear then, beneath the bowing trees draped with lights? Does it sound mad to say that it was a pattern or an intricate symmetry? In any event, it was some strange resemblance. Something an ancient intelligence within her recognized from long ago. She saw it all unfolding before her, vast and perfect, as the three of them dragged their chairs toward a table.

Beside the canvas bag lay the broken wooden frame and the artwork itself. The glass hadn't only shattered (the mood explained, in its defense); it had also smashed inward and damaged the print, which had been so beautifully produced: dark inks upon thick bamboo paper.

"Now it's finished." That's what Duchamp said when his enormous work The Large Glass, eight years in the making, had broken. Or at any rate that's how her art teacher had told the story, some twenty years before, and that was the way it had always stayed with her.

Do you remember how it happened? In 1926, in Brooklyn. They put the two glass panes one on top of the other in the back of a truck, not knowing what they were carrying. The panes bounced against the metal carriage all the way to Connecticut, cracks radiating across their surfaces.

"The more I look at it the more I like it," Duchamp eventually said. "There's a symmetry in the cracking. There's almost an intention there. A curious intention that I am not responsible for, that I respect and love."

In a different era, she would have offered the story as a fatalist consolation. She used to be able to make him feel better. She used to be able to say, "What are all these despairing sighs?" and walk over to him and...