Philip, a short story (excerpt)

He stands in front of them with a godly absolution. He is their leader, no, their teacher, no, their father, perhaps. He prefers not to sit behind his desk but to stand in front of it; the metal thing holds nothing but his pencils and his mug of watery coffee -- this, he assumes, is sufficient. The windows in his classroom are always open; he has rolled cheap rugs from Persian flee markets across his linoleum floor; there are flowers on the windowsills, maps on the walls, and books stacked across the floor -- books everywhere. Translations from Vergil, the indelible prose of Plath and Poe, the hard-cover Austens and Williams and Shakespeares from garage sales across the county. His classroom is crammed with voices; juvenile during the day, deep and ghostly during the evenings. Sometimes, grading essays at seven o’ clock, he will hear them, almost whisper-like, dancing out from the dark corners, enticing him, seducing him.

He will not pretend to be completely sane -- this, he has decided early on, is one of the most deadly sins of man. Even when Clara was alive, he had heard them, these incredible men and women who had, like the rest of us, lived and married and drank wine and sobbed and died -- but no, not their voices, these voices, unending, turned pink and sun-burnt under their scorching fame.

One evening, after an hour of furious grading, he put his feet on his desk and noticed a copy of Austen by his heels. He picked it up; it was natural; like a moth drawn to the flame, like a heroin addict to a needle, he, Samuel Bryant, is enchanted by literature. The copy he had picked up, Pride and Prejudice, a rather effeminate favorite novel in Clara’s eyes, felt light in his hands. He opened to the middle. Lydia has just run off with Mr. Wickham, how awful. Copious anxiety in the Bennet household. Poor Elizabeth. When he finished, it was past nine. He reads quickly, but he had missed dinner. Nevertheless. He left the book in a desk drawer, calmed by the thought that Lydia would always be running off to flirt with the officers, that Elizabeth would always be in a state of constant oblivion.

He came home to the letter.
Samuel, my beloved,

I always knew I would die someday, and for this I am most grateful. I don’t know what would have become of me otherwise. Life is the sweetest accompanied by death -- how else would we learn to be humble? It is a blessing to know that things exist with a sense of exigency. I lived my life more than I could bear -- I am not filled with sadness; I am filled with everything. Please don’t let them say I died of sadness, because it is the happiness, and excitement, and joy that filled me, too. I do not want to die. But I don’t know what would have become of me if I went on feeling. I can’t go on feeling. Life is too fragile; I’m afraid I’ll break it, or else it will break me. I’ve never been a writer like you, beloved, but I don’t know how I can say this otherwise. I love you. I love you so much I cannot bear to end this letter. Maybe you’d say I don’t really want to end my life. Forgive me. I forgive you for forgiving me. I want to keep writing, but it must end. Everything must end. With all of my life and myself, I love you. I love you more than you will ever know. It is an impossibility for you to understand this. I love you more than this will demonstrate. The word “love” doesn’t mean anything; it does not do justice to any love in the world.

My deepest apologies,

Clara

He went into the bedroom. Clara was on top of the bedcovers. He puts his hand above her cheek. Lukewarm. He wasn’t going to read the letter again; the words would not change their meaning a second time, and his wife was dying (or dead) already. If there was one thing he had become convinced of after twelve years of studying literature, it was this: there was nothing more futile than human activity. Yes, the human spirit was strong, but the will to bend the rules of any juggernaut was an impossible feat. Gatsby could not win back Daisy’s heart, Macbeth could not retain his throne, and he, Samuel, could not retain his wife. He could try -- he could call the hospital, they could rush by in their wailing metal machines, Clara might live, but, oh, she would die, if not once, many times over, tomorrow, and the next day, whether by her means or not. To play with such perseverance was folly in its purest form.

He looked at Clara. His leg was not yet sore from the bent position he was in; the letter was still clutched tightly in his hand, if not slightly damper than before. How quickly he had come to his conclusion, he almost wished to hate himself. To let her die, or to not try to revive her -- which was the greater sin? How quickly the bed seemed to fold in on her hips, and how pale she looked -- could the sickly form still possibly harbor life?

He laid himself down next to her. She was not the most beautiful woman he had seen in his life, but he wasn’t married to her beauty. She was intelligent and provocative and illuminating -- such a cliche, he thought, but aren’t we all? She is intelligent and provocative and illuminating. She is dying and she might be dead.

It is now that he remembered Austen. He felt faint. What had happened happened. His wife is dead (dying). But Austen, wretched Austen. Wretched Samuel. Who is at fault? Galileo’s stones, or the weight of gravity rushing toward the earth? The beckoner, or the beckoned? 

The first time they had made love, it was in a butcher shop. Owned by Clara’s aunt, it was a solitary building, red-brick with yellow lettering. Surrounded with strips of bleeding meat they had tossed and turned and sucked into each other, pushing heat into each other’s bones. Hearts were broken and welded together, and around them were the corpses of the dead, the doomed, the damned. 
His mind on it days after, Samuel, literary-minded even at nineteen, could not shake the metaphorical resonance of making love in a butcher shop. It was life and it was death, heat and ice, white on red. But now, lying on the bed next to her, Samuel put his hand into his wife’s. His mind throbbed with the world’s orbit. To call for reason where there was none -- this was the consummate vice. What had happened happened. They were young, he and Clara. They had tried to make love without understanding love. They had called for ghosts when there were none. The sun had sunk and the waves had scattered from the shores. The rain had fallen and the earth had pushed it back up into the sky. 
The dead, Samuel realized, die and they die suddenly. There is no preparation and no closure, just a solemn marching-on, trumpets muted, heads bent to the pavement. 

 He and Clara had made love in a butcher shop. It was simple and it was enough.