What Remains in the Fruit Bowl

The papaya sat on the counter for three days before Richard finally touched it. Three days since Elena walked out with a suitcase and her mother's vintage coat, leaving behind this single, alien fruit she'd bought from some specialty grocer downtown. Richard stood in the kitchen of their apartment—their apartment, still, though the lease renewal paperwork sat unsigned on the counter—and stared at the thing like it was a small, sleeping animal he didn't know how to feed.

The cable bill was due tomorrow. That had been Elena's domain, along with the phone and internet and the peculiar alchemy of turning their mismatched incomes into something resembling a future. Richard had spent the past three nights watching baseball games he didn't care about, volume turned low, letting the announcer's voice fill the room where they used to talk about having children, about moving to Portland, about the life they were definitely, absolutely going to build together once he finished his dissertation. That was two years ago.

He picked up the papaya now. It felt obscenely heavy in his hand, like carrying someone else's heart.

A memory came to him: Elena on that hike in Maine, pointing out a fox darting through the brush, its tail a copper flash against the dying leaves. She'd grabbed his arm, her fingers pressing into his skin, and for a moment he'd felt it—the electric certainty that this was it, this was the person who would witness his life. That fox had known something he didn't. It had kept moving.

Richard found a knife and cut into the fruit. The scent that rose up was strange and complicated, sweet and musky at once, like something that had traveled a very long way to end up here, softening on his counter. Inside, the flesh was the color of a sunset he'd never seen with her, crowded with black seeds that looked like tiny eyes.

You had to bear it. That's what his therapist said about grief, about loss, about the particular architecture of ending something you'd spent years building. You had to bear it like weather, like the knowledge that you were thirty-seven and starting over, that some days you would only be able to watch baseball and eat strange fruit in an apartment that felt increasingly like a museum someone had already evacuated.

Richard speared a piece of papaya with his fork and put it in his mouth. It tasted like something you could learn to love, eventually. It tasted like the beginning of something he wasn't ready for but would have to become anyway.