Elgin Rosenthal Character Analysis

“It will help him save face,” you said. “Adultery is for cuckolds. Unreasonable behavior is for martyrs. A mad wife is better than a bad wife. What will he tell his friends?”

Those days have a crystalline clearness to me now. Whichever way I hold them up to the light they refract a different colour. Louise in her blue dress gathering fir cones in the skirt. Louise against the purple sky looking like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. The young green of our life and the last yellow roses in November. The colours blur and I can only see her face. Then I hear her voice crisp and white. “I will never let you go.”

As I embalm you in my memory, the first thing I shall do is to hook out your brain through your accommodating orifices. Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph and not a poem. You must be rid of life as I am rid of life. We shall sink together you and I, down, down into the dark voids where once the vital organs were.

I’m living on my memories like a cheap has-been. I’ve been sitting in this chair by the fire, my hand on the cat, talking aloud, fool-ramblings. There’s a doctor’s textbook fallen open on the floor. To me it’s a book of spells.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it’s my own body I touch. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard’s chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls. The bolts of your collar bone undo me. Thus she was, here and here.

All other colors are absorbed. The dull tinges of the day never penetrate my blackened skull. I live in four blank walls like an anchorite. You were a brightly lit room and I shut the door. You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.

“It will help him save face,” you said. “Adultery is for cuckolds. Unreasonable behavior is for martyrs. A mad wife is better than a bad wife. What will he tell his friends?”

Those days have a crystalline clearness to me now. Whichever way I hold them up to the light they refract a different colour. Louise in her blue dress gathering fir cones in the skirt. Louise against the purple sky looking like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. The young green of our life and the last yellow roses in November. The colours blur and I can only see her face. Then I hear her voice crisp and white. “I will never let you go.”

As I embalm you in my memory, the first thing I shall do is to hook out your brain through your accommodating orifices. Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph and not a poem. You must be rid of life as I am rid of life. We shall sink together you and I, down, down into the dark voids where once the vital organs were.

I’m living on my memories like a cheap has-been. I’ve been sitting in this chair by the fire, my hand on the cat, talking aloud, fool-ramblings. There’s a doctor’s textbook fallen open on the floor. To me it’s a book of spells.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it’s my own body I touch. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard’s chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls. The bolts of your collar bone undo me. Thus she was, here and here.

All other colors are absorbed. The dull tinges of the day never penetrate my blackened skull. I live in four blank walls like an anchorite. You were a brightly lit room and I shut the door. You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.