One-Sentence Story: The Feather of Truth
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| Hand on Feathers by Martial Raysse |
She has the scale and she has the feather of truth (her Egyptian great grandmother had left it to her—my most precious possession, dear one, she said), so all that she needs now is the heart itself—sometimes she feels like just ripping it out of his chest and tossing the bloody piece of meat right on the scale, but that would defeat the entire purpose of her experiment because what she wants is to understand, exactly who is this man and should she stand by him or not? (her partner—the therapist who shared her office space and with whom she conducted popular seminars on family life—a married man with a young child—a man with whom she had lunch every Friday afternoon for the last six years—God, how she loved talking to him—had confessed to her that he’d been having affairs with his patients—that would be patients with an “s”— and had gone on to explain that he was telling her because one of the women, feeling betrayed by him after he had left her for yet another woman, had not only told his wife “everything,” but had hired a lawyer), so she had decided to write down everything she knew about him on index cards and weigh that stack of cards against the feather of truth, but now, alone in her office, when she places the evidence on the scale, it begins to sink dangerously low, and she knows what that means—bad, dear one, her great grandmother had told her, when the heart sinks below the feather of truth, it is a bad one—and then she suddenly remembers something she had forgotten to include—how he had freely given his home phone number to all his patients—something she herself had never done—and how he had taken all those emergency calls—3:00 am or not—unstintingly—and when she adds that card to the stack, his “heart” begins to rise up and the scale begins to balance evenly, and she knows what that means, too—mostly good, her great grandmother had said, mostly good, dear one, and that is good enough—and then she recalls something else she had forgotten to include—how she had overheard him lying to his wife on the phone one afternoon—an emergency evening appointment so he wouldn’t be home for dinner, he had said—and he done it with an ease and equanimity that chilled her now in retrospect—and when she adds that card to the stack, his heart begins to sink down again—and then she returns to the time when she first met him—he had approached her after her first seminar, telling her how much he—he, with his three books and his big reputation—had admired her work and how he had so generously taken her under his wing—and with that card his heart begins to rise up again, and then she pictures his patient—the one whose heart he had broken—she had seen that young woman in the waiting room many times, beautiful, surely, but also obviously suffering from depression, and though he had not caused her depression—she couldn’t blame him for that—he had not helped her, when he could have helped her, should have helped her, and with that card his heart begins to sink down again, and then the alarm on her phone goes off—it's five o'clock already!—quick—she needs to come up with an idea for dinner tonight and it's definitely too soon to make pasta again.
by Nina Zolotow
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