Malachi's Wall

“I don’t care,” Malachi said, scratching his beard. “They can call me any name they want. I don’t care. Don’t you know by now that it doesn’t hurt me?

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“I don’t care,” Malachi said, scratching his beard. “They can call me any name they want. I don’t care. Don’t you know by now that it doesn’t hurt me? They can say what they want, believe what they want. Their opinions are nothing to me. I just don’t care.”

He stretched out his long legs on the beat-up couch and settled down to study an old book on how to build a dry stone wall. The cup of coffee I brought him was sitting there getting cold on the apple crate that he uses as a table. The orange cat was sleeping on his feet.

“Okay, Mal, you’re right. I’ll just keep out of it. I know how you feel, honey, I believe you, but that hubristic rubbish in the Journal just pisses me off.”

“Don’t worry about the stupid review – I tell you it doesn’t matter,” he said, nose buried in his book.

But it does matter. Anyone can see that it hurts — his tense jaw, the tilt of his chin, the lifting of his shoulders. His writing means everything to him. I should know – he spends more time thinking about the next brilliant line of prose, the next sparkling metaphor, than he does about me or our marriage.

I’m sorry, did that sound bitter? It wasn’t meant to. Truly. He is a passionate man, and I am still his biggest fan after all these years. I know he’ll eventually forget this insult, as he has before, and I will find some small way to help pull him back. I always do, because I love him, you know, and when does love ever walk away?

So, now he is on to building a wall for the first time — stone upon stone, convex into concave, chipping away, leveling, adjusting, resetting. It is much the same as writing a story, if you think about it. Or a metaphor for piecing together a successful marriage. It is all about accommodation: set the large, essential pieces in place, fill in the gaps with the smaller bits, and just keep at it until something balanced, solid and strong has been created.